


Happiness is the Road

by DarkLady38



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/F, Gen, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, reddie babey!, the walking dead-ish au, trans eddie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-01-27 06:57:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 34,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21388003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkLady38/pseuds/DarkLady38
Summary: Two years after the death of Pennywise, people start dying all over the world. Trouble is, they don't stay dead for long. As the walking dead sweep across the country, husbands Richie and Eddie take it on the run.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 10
Kudos: 50





	1. Born to Run

Richie Tozier found out that the world had begun to end when he was kicked off the air. It was 103.7 RTHK’s Power Hour, and Richie had lined up 60 solid minutes of power ballads of his youth for all you listeners out there, giving him enough time to run out for a Shasta and maybe a Lean Pocket from the studio refrigerator before the first commercial break, but just as he’d risen from his seat, Foreigner’s “I Wanna Know What Love Is” cut off with a squeal of static. Suspecting technical difficulties, Richie groaned and reached for his phone to text the maintenance man, but before he could, a woman began to speak in a dreary monotone.

“This is an Emergency Bulletin from the Seattle Department of Public Health. All citizens be advised that there is now a quarantine between East Madison Street and Lake Union. If possible, stay in your homes until further notice. Repeat, no travel through the area between East Madison Street and Lake Union will be permitted. If you are in this area, stay where you are. Officials will soon be there to assist you. There is no need for distress—” 

Richie was already gone. There’d be a minute and a half of dead air between “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Faithfully,” but that was the furthest thing from his mind. After they had returned from Derry, Eddie had quit his job and filed for divorce, and Richie’s manager had quit him. They had both needed a fresh start, and Richie knew a woman who was looking for someone to take over hosting her radio station in Seattle. It was good enough for them. Eddie had taken a job bookkeeping for a restaurant in Capitol Hill, eventually graduating to managing the place, and when the previous owner retired, they bought the place. Under Eddie’s exacting leadership it had thrived, generating a great deal of buzz and some unwanted attention. A well-meaning blogger had written a flattering review, praising Eddie as a trailblazer for the transgender community. Little had come of it, except for a few nice letters, and even fewer nasty ones, but those even fewer nasty ones had hit hard. Richie had destroyed them before Eddie could see them, but he suspected that Eddie would’ve taken it in stride, programmed by his mother and Myra to accept being demeaned and mistreated, though since leaving Myra, he had made great strides in regaining his self-confidence. 

Richie, however, was another story. He had sat for almost an hour in their breakfast nook, a letter full of slurs and threats clenched in his sweaty fist, heart beating fair out of his chest, trying to overcome his panic. He had come so close to losing Eddie back in Derry, and the thought of enduring that uncertainty, that terror again was near unbearable. Equally intolerable was his sense of helplessness. His fear of not being able to protect Eddie, the knowledge that Eddie was especially vulnerable, his own ineffectiveness in the past—all of these anxieties coalesced into a choking, paralyzing panic in that little wooden banquette. But he had allowed himself to panic, for about five minutes, and then he had gotten up and burned the letter and set about running a bath to surprise Eddie upon his return home. Those fears—his thorny protective instinct, his worrywart disposition, his paranoia—those were his problems, not Eddie’s, and he wouldn’t add to Eddie’s burden by asking him to manage his emotions, too. Eddie was cautious by nature, with a few notable exceptions (like when he’d speared a demon clown, for instance, or, kissed Richie directly afterwards, lips tasting like mud, blood, and exhilaration), and more than capable of taking care of himself. He was fine. 

Except he might not be, not now, a thought that made him lean on the accelerator more than was appropriate in a residential area, screaming southbound on University Avenue until he reached the blockade. It was a line of yellow police tape reinforced by cop cars, lights flashing. Cops kept watch every yard or so. A crowd of people had gathered. Some asked for answers. Some asked to be let in. Richie wasn’t planning on asking anyone. He shoved through and grabbed the tape, only to be shoved back roughly by a state trooper. 

“No one gets in,” he snarled. “Clear out.”

“My husband’s in there!” Richie snapped, taking a step closer. 

“Sir, if you don’t back up, I’ll be forced to—”

Richie never got to figure out what he’d be forced to do, because just then, a tall woman with blonde hair and a briefcase hurled herself at the trooper, wailing about a job interview, and Richie took the opportunity to slip under the tape and take off running. The cop saw him, but there was nothing he could do until he pried the woman off of him, and by the looks of it, that was going to be a two-man job. He ran up 23rd Ave until he got to Aloha Street, then took a left. Lutece Liquors was the fourth building on the left, sandwiched between a pet shop and a music store. The window was full of accolades from various websites and magazines. Richie shoved the door open and jogged inside, looking for—

“Eddie!” he yelled. The patrons, who were all clustered together in a knot in the middle of the dining room, looked up nervously. A middle-aged man approached him.

“Do you know what’s—”

Richie ignored him. 

“EDDIE!” 

The door to the kitchen flew open and Eddie jogged out, cheeks flushed. 

“What do you—Richie!” 

Richie nudged the man out of the way and embraced his husband. He scooped him up by the waist, lifting his feet off the ground, and buried his face in Eddie’s neck. Eddie hugged him back, one hand cradling the back of Richie’s head, the other pressed against his lower back. Richie pulled back to examine Eddie closely, tilting his head from side to side, like he was looking for bruises. Eddie allowed it, eyes closed, basking in the relief of having Richie here with him. 

“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” Richie asked, voice breaking slightly. 

“I’m fine,” Eddie said, amused. “Who’s they?”

“The cops, the fucking—what’s going on, Eds, they can’t keep you in here—”

“Something’s wrong,” one of the patrons said tonelessly. “Some kind of epidemic. I heard on the radio that this is a quarantine.”

“Who got sick?” Eddie asked. 

Nobody seemed to know. Richie looked up at the walls. Among the photos placed there by the previous owner were some of their wedding pictures: Eddie, radiant, laughing as Richie serenaded him, accompanied by their wedding band. Their first kiss as husbands. The two of them, sharing a moment on the dance floor. 

“Don’t know,” Richie ground out. “Don’t care. We gotta get out of here. If someone is sick, we can’t stick around to find—” 

A piercing scream came from the kitchen. Eddie made as if to run in, but Richie grabbed his elbow. “Wait—”

The double doors to the kitchen burst open, and there stood one of the cooks, but he didn’t look right, and not just because the lower half of his face was covered in blood and pieces of skin. His skin was pale, and his eyes were glazed, and there was a livid bite on his neck. 

“Holy shit,” Richie whispered. 

“Carlos!” Eddie wailed. 

“Time to go,” Richie breathed, grabbing Eddie by the back of his shirt. “Come on. Everybody out!” 

Eddie, Richie, and their clientele ran out the door, but Carlos followed. He wasn’t very fast, but he was determined, and if watching movies had taught Richie anything, it was that it was only a matter of time before someone tripped and fell. He just needed to make sure it wasn’t Eddie. The point, however, became moot fairly quickly, because that was when the SWAT team arrived. Richie wasn’t sure how you were supposed to kill zombies, but sublimating the head seemed to do the trick. It was a little comforting to see Carlos go down, but decidedly less comforting when the cops started pointing their guns at the others. The people scattered, but Richie was transfixed with horror as the SWAT team started shooting at them as they ran away. 

“Let’s go!” Eddie ordered, grabbing Richie’s wrist. They took off running, ducking between buildings and into alleyways. “Where’s the car?”

“Back on the Ave. Eddie, what’s going on?”

“You think I know?” 

When they were about a block away from Madison Ave, Eddie brought them to a stop. “They’re not just going to let us through,” Eddie warned. 

“If we run—”

“You saw what they were doing back there! We can’t outrun bullets, Richie. Give me a moment to think.” Eddie paced around in a tight little circle, and despite the depressing nature of their situation, Richie couldn’t help but smile. No matter the situation, he was eternally charmed by Eddie’s little mannerisms. Whether he was karate-chopping the air to emphasize his points, or flicking the syringe of Delatestryl three or four more times than was necessary, Richie never failed to be delighted by the idiosyncrasies of the man he loved more than life itself. “Ah! Help me with this!”

He pointed to the manhole under their feet. 

“Jesus, Eddie, are you kidding me? That thing’s gotta weigh like, fifty pounds!”

“Don’t be a wimp. Here, use this.”

With the help of a metal pipe laying in a nearby alleyway, they managed to lever open the manhole cover. 

“You know, I’m not sure if you remember, but I’ve had some bad experiences in sewers,” Richie quipped, looking into the dark mouth of the manhole. 

“Well, if you’d rather get shot at, be my guest.” 

Richie went down first, because Eddie knew that he would insist on it, and it wasn’t worth a fight. Richie made a soft sound of disgust as he stepped off the last rung of the ladder and landed in about two inches of stagnant water. 

“How will we know when it’s safe to come out?” he asked.

Eddie sighed, reaching for Richie’s hand in the darkness. 

“We guess. Better to overshoot than undershoot, though. They can’t see us come out.” 

Richie was terrified, but the warmth of Eddie’s hand in his, and the resolve in Eddie’s voice persuaded him to remain calm. “Rich,” Eddie whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

Richie paused. There were zombies, and he was pretty sure that this was the end of the world as he knew it, and they were in the stinking darkness of another goddamn sewer, but the memory of twenty-seven years without Eddie, twenty-seven years in the closet, was still fresh with him, and this, this was nothing compared to that.

“Yeah,” he said, giving Eddie’s hand a squeeze. “I’m okay.”


	2. The Great Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Heading for the great escape,   
Heading for the rave,  
Heading for the permanent holiday.  
Heading for the winter trip,   
Heading for the slide,   
Heading for the dignified walk away.  
Heading for the open road,  
Goodbye to all that,   
Heading for the automatic overload..."  
—Marillion, "The Great Escape."

“Ten blocks,” Richie panted, leaning up against the slimy brick wall of the sewer. “That’s got to be enough.” 

“Let’s give it a few more,” Eddie said, pulling Richie by the hand further down the dark passage. 

“Your legs are so much shorter than mine!” Richie gasped, jogging to keep up. “How are you so fast?”

“It’s because you don’t do anything,” Eddie retorted. “Remember that time I tried to take you jogging at Green Lake?”

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about that anymore!” 

Eddie gave a short bark of laughter, shaking his head, but he did ease up his pace a little. Richie had felt a little self-conscious when he went to the gym with Eddie, and he’d gotten a little sick to his stomach when Eddie wrapped his arms around his thickening waist, but he’d never worried that it might be a survival issue. 

“Here,” Eddie barked. “C’mon, up the ladder.”

“Sir yes sir,” Richie mumbled, putting his shoulder to the manhole and straining. After a minute of effort (along with a number of ominous twinges in his lower back), he managed to slide it off. They finally exited the sewers right at the edge of the University District, on the Ave. People were milling about. Some were college students, some homeless people, but everyone seemed too occupied with listening to the emergency broadcasts blaring to take much notice of Richie and Eddie. 

“PLEASE REMAIN CALM,” the same female robo-voice droned. “A QUARANTINE HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. HELP IS ON THE WAY. TRAVEL IS PROHIBITED. PLEASE REMAIN CALM. A QUAR--”

Eddie grabbed Richie’s hand and took off again. They jogged up the Ave for about three blocks before taking a right. Their house was a two-story Victorian right on the border between the U District and Ravenna, across the street from a park, only a few blocks away from the University of Washington. It was old and rickety, but big, and the location was absolutely prime. Or, rather, it had been. 

“Come on,” Richie gasped. “Pack your shit. How much T do you have?” 

“I don’t know. A few weeks?”

That sounded like a pretty good stockpile, but Eddie’s voice was distressed. For such a ball of nerves, he’d been handling a zombie apocalypse pretty well, but the idea of having to go off T-- well. 

“We’ll find more,” Richie vowed, pressing a quick kiss to Eddie’s forehead. “We’ll raid a pharmacy. I promise we’ll figure it out. But for now--”

“We need to go. Right.” 

Richie grabbed the enormous duffle bag Eddie had brought with him from Derry up to the kitchen and started packing nonperishables. The cans of Chili-Mac that he kept in the pantry for when he was alone for dinner were all tossed in, as were a couple boxes of Ritz crackers, a bag of dried mango, teriyaki turkey jerky, Richie’s Honey Smacks, and Eddie’s Raisin Bran. Next, he packed his clothes, which were mostly variations on the same two or three outfits, some hiking boots, socks and underwear, a toothbrush, warming personal lubricant, Eddie’s favorite strap-on, Norton’s Anthology of Poetry, 5th Ed., a couple packers, a bottle of Scope, and--

“Hey!” Eddie yelled from somewhere below. “Have you seen the isopropyl alcohol?” 

“It’s in the hall closet!” 

“Thanks!” 

By the time the duffle was full, Richie could hardly carry it. He had to drape it over his shoulders like he was some sort of pack mule. 

“Hey,” Eddie said, jogging up the stairs. He was holding a taupe cross-shoulder satchel that Richie guessed was a first aid kit. “So, uh. We should get out of the city.” 

“Yeah,” Richie agreed. He lumbered down the stairs and out the door (which Eddie held for him) and deposited the duffle into the trunk of Eddie’s 2017 Hyundai Genesis. “So. Where to?”

Eddie shuffled his feet. 

“Well, this wasn’t exactly how I was planning to tell you, but I was planning a surprise. A getaway. For your birthday. I rented a cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains, thought we could spend a week there, you know, getting acquainted. It’s remote. Safe.”

The situation was serious, and Richie knew that, but he couldn’t help but stop dead in his tracks, bend down, and kiss Eddie. His lips were so soft, and he leaned into it almost immediately, licking into Richie’s mouth like he was desperate, hands coming up to fist in Richie’s shirt. He gave a soft moan of displeasure when they separated, his expression a provocative melange of petulance and wantonness, and Richie had to close his eyes and count to ten before he could get too carried away. 

“Where?”

“Lowman, Idaho,” Eddie replied, placing a hand on the door handle. “You drive.” 

***

For weeks after they’d run away together Eddie had kept his shirt on, even during sex, hiding the scars from his top surgery. Richie knew that Eddie knew that they were there, but he just wasn’t ready. Eddie needed time to convince himself that Richie wasn’t going to pull off his face one morning, revealing Myra behind the mask, and scream: 

“SURPRISE!” 

Richie wasn’t offended. He was a little impatient, because he wanted to see all of Eddie, but he kept reminding himself that there would be time for that. God willing, there would be many years wherein he could see, touch, kiss every inch of Eddie. Then, one day, he walked into their bedroom, and Eddie was on the bed, naked, rubbing lotion onto his scars. 

“Do you want me to leave?” Richie asked softly.

“No,” Eddie replied, looking up, a shy smile playing around his lips. “I want you to stay.”

Richie sat down on the bed next to him, hands trembling slightly, full of adrenaline and love. Eddie handed him the tub of Selevax and leaned back, eyes closed. 

“Can I--”

“Please.”

Richie scooped up a glob of the lotion, ready for a heartwarming relationship milestone, but Eddie ruined the moment by cracking an eye open and saying; “Hey, a little goes a long way. This stuff ain’t cheap, you know.” 

Richie laughed, a little relieved. It was easy for him to forget at times that the beautiful creature in front of him was still the same old Eddie, unable to let a little thing like romance get in the way of his anal retentive nature. 

“Do they hurt?” Richie asked as he smoothed the cream onto one of the slightly bowed, red lines. He could’ve kicked himself, sure he’d put his foot in his mouth, but Eddie just gave a content sigh and ran a hand along Richie’s forearm. 

“Not anymore. At first, they hurt like a bitch, but now they just...tug...a little.”

Richie put the tub of lotion down and cupped Eddie’s face in his hand. They were lying almost chest-to-chest, looking into each other’s eyes. Richie was overwhelmed by Eddie--his scent, his touch, the beauty of his eyes, the amount of tanned skin that he could just sweep a hand over, if he so desired. He smelled like baby oil. 

“I’m sorry I’ve been so weird about this,” Eddie said. His head was pillowed on his left forearm, liquid brown eyes staring into Richie’s. 

“Don’t be,” Richie said immediately. “I’ve been chasing you my whole life, Kaspbrak. I’ll take whatever you give me.”

“Richie,” Eddie crooned, voice colored by a deep fondness. He reached up to take off his glasses. “Can you still see me?”

“Sort of.” It was just barely the truth. Without his glasses, Richie could only see a pale blob topped with a darker smear where Eddie’s face was supposed to be. “I might have to read your body language in Braille, though.”

Eddie snorted, a derisive sound that bubbled into a giggle before he could clamp down on it. Richie laughed, too. It wasn’t every day that he managed to get a chuckle out of Eddie. 

“Here,” Eddie said, placing his glasses back on. “You look good with them, anyways. I just wanted to see your eyes. Let me tell you a secret, Richie.”

“Yeah?” 

“You’ve got a nice face,” Eddie breathed. Richie’s cheeks suddenly felt intolerably warm.

“Really?” he asked, which was the stupidest possible response to a compliment of that nature. 

Eddie nodded. He looked a little pink, too, but not from embarrassment. Looking down, Richie realized that one of his hands was gripping Eddie’s waist, and his thumb was idly stroking the soft skin of his stomach, and Eddie’s inner thighs were shining and tacky. 

“Yeah,” Eddie said, smiling, rolling over and straddling Richie with in one fluid movement. “But you didn’t hear it from me.” 

***   
It took them almost eleven hours to get to the plot of land that housed the Bear Creek Summer Homes. There had been some traffic getting out of Seattle, but most people seemed to be content to stay put. They’d listened to the radio for the first two hours, but the broadcasts had gotten progressively more panicked, and eventually stopped altogether. After a few moments of fuzz across the dial, Eddie had flicked the radio off with a decisive click, and inserted a Blue Oyster Cult CD instead. Richie sang along to “Burning For You,” which brought a smile to Eddie’s face, but they soon lapsed into silence, wondering when the news would reach the others. 

They were on Ponderosa Pine Scenic Route when Eddie’s phone rang. He gasped. 

“Richie, it’s Marian!”

Marian had been Eddie’s divorce attorney. Bringing a spirit of unwillingness to treat with a domestic abuser, she had stomped Myra’s legal team decisively and won Eddie every penny of his money back, along with modest alimony that they all knew would forever go unpaid. They had become close friends, and, Richie realized, they had just missed their weekly meetup for drinks at Eddie’s restaurant. Eddie answered, putting her on speaker.

“Mare? Are you okay?”

“--die? I can’t--” 

Her voice disintegrated into fuzz for a few moments, then returned. “--isten. I’m going to meet--mother.” More interference. “--ington D.C--afe.” 

The line went dead.

“Well, at least she’s alive,” Richie sighed.

“Signal’s bad,” Eddie said. He stared moodily out the window. “She said she was going to meet her mom in D.C. That’s all the way across the country. You think she’ll make it?”

“Of course she will,” Richie reassured. “Hell, for all we know they’ve got it under control by now.”

“Richie, our goddamn president couldn’t find his ass with two hands, a roadmap, a team of doctors, and a goddamn ass-detecting GPS, and you think he’s gonna stop the fucking zombie apocalypse?”

Richie sighed.

“No. But it’s nice to think so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you leave me a comment pls know that I will think about it every day until death grants me her sweet release


	3. Fantastic Place

The second of the three Bear Creek Summer Homes had been purchased by Helen and Harold “Hoot” Gibson in the early sixties to celebrate the departure for college of their seventh and youngest child. Hoot was long dead from emphysema by the time his great-granddaughter put his cabin on Airbnb to fill it while the Gibson clan were off at work, scattered around the country. Helen, now 103, lived in an old folks’ home in Meridian. Whenever her kids would visit her (five sons and two daughters, though her oldest daughter had passed from a brain tumor five years ago) she would always ask them: 

“Is the Cabin full?”

They would always tell her that it was, and one day, their great-granddaughter had taken steps to ensure it. Unknown to Richie and Eddie, that same great-granddaughter, now twenty years old, was making her way across the country with her father, Helen’s grandson, who had once vomited in the laundromat in Lowman, the closest town to the Cabin, her mother, and her younger brother. By the time they made it, Richie and Eddie would have long since departed. 

While they were on their way, however, the road up to the cabins almost killed Eddie’s car. It was a steep dirt road, filled with hairpin turns as it zig-zagged its way up the mountain. Sharp rocks were sunk into the dirt, scraping the undercarriage of the car and grinding against the tires. 

“Jesus, Richie, you’re gonna puncture the gas tank!”

“That’s not a real thing that happens, is it?” Richie asked. 

Mere moments before Eddie became convinced that their car would never make it, they crested the hill and pulled into a dusty driveway. They got out, walked onto the patchy lawn, and looked at Bear Creek Summer Home No. 2. 

The cabin was made of a reddish wood. It looked a bit like a life-size Lincoln Logs cabin, capped with a green gabled roof. An enormous ponderosa pine grew up through a hole in the deck, spreading its branches overhead and showering needles over the roof and deck. A tetherball pole with an accompanying yellow ball stood in the yard. A few feet away, a salt lick sat, like a giant die, in the middle of a circle of bricks. Nearby, a game of horseshoes stood abandoned. 

Eddie took a deep breath and leaned against Richie. 

“We made it.” 

“Yeah,” Richie breathed, wrapping an arm around him, rubbing his back. “This is nice, Eds. Thanks.” 

Eddie murmured some nonsense words into Richie’s chest. He was exhausted, that much was obvious. Richie was exhausted, too. The near miss in Seattle had shaken both of them, and the stress of not knowing what was going on was taking its toll. They were both thinking about their friends—Bev and Ben in San Francisco, Mike in Miami, Bill in Boston, Marian, apparently, in Washington D.C...how long would it take? Would they take it on the run, too? Would they even see it coming? It was only a matter of time before a contagious individual hopped on a plane and landed on the East Coast. God. Richie just wanted to sleep until all this was over. 

Eddie pulled a keyring out of his glove box and shuffled up the steps and unlocked the door. 

“Rich, if you wanna take a look around, I think I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Okay,” Richie said, a little taken aback. “Don’t use all the hot water. I think I’m gonna take a nap.” 

Eddie gave him a pale smile and stepped inside the bathroom, shutting the door softly, but firmly. Richie was a clingy bitch, and he often sat cross-legged on the toilet, reading aloud to Eddie, or listening to him singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” while he ran through his haircare routine. He would sometimes think of Sonia and Myra’s octopus tentacles, wondering if he was following in their footsteps, and pull back, but then Eddie would notice the artificial distance and patiently and calmly invite Richie back in. 

The door clicked back open, and Eddie poked his head out.

“I can hear you thinking out there,” Eddie said. “What’s going on?”

“Did I do something wrong?” Richie asked, then cringed. It was so pathetic, so clingy, so—

“I’m worried about the others,” Eddie said. He came out of the bathroom, still fully clothed, and stood next to Richie, hands in his pants pockets. “It seems like you’re handling this so well, and I don’t want to, you know, bring you down, but I just can’t stop thinking.” 

“Oh, honey,” Richie sighed. He reached for Eddie’s hand, and Eddie grabbed it gratefully. “I’m worried, too. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Bev’s gonna be running this wasteland soon enough.” 

Eddie laughed, dragging a hand down his face. 

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re probably right.” 

They sat for a few moments in silence. Eddie scooted closer, resting his head against Richie’s shoulder. “What about Marian? Do you really think she’ll make it?”

“Of course she will!” Richie chastised, nudging Eddie with his elbow. “Hell, she fought Myra’s team of hired goons! She took down a woman ten times her own body weight! What the hell’re some goddamn zombies gonna do?” 

They sat in silence for a few moments. The clock in the other room bonged seven times. Eddie yawned. 

“I really do need a shower, Rich,” he finally said.

“Want me to join you?”

“Absolutely not. I want to get clean, not dirty.” 

“Aww.”

“Yeah, aww.” Eddie shooed him. “Do me a favor and take a look around.” 

The first place Richie explored was the hall closet. It was full of fishing poles, tool and tackle boxes, and broken appliances. A hunting rifle was hung on the far wall. Several hatchets, one large fire ax, and various hunting knives were displayed in a dusty cabinet. A crossbow was locked in a plexiglass cabinet. Richie imagined Eddie holding that crossbow, and laughed softly. The zombies wouldn’t stand a chance. 

The living room was dominated by a squashy red vinyl couch. A few elderly rocking chairs were also scattered around the room. The heavy, ornate clock they had heard earlier was sitting on the mantle above the fireplace, accompanied by two pairs of deer antlers. The kitchen was stocked with an old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind that you could get stuck inside, and a gas stove. The cabinets were full of paper plates, and some heavy silver utensils were in the drawers. Richie jogged out to the car to grab the duffle bag, lugged it up the stairs and into the kitchen, and started unpacking. It didn’t take long, and Richie started to get a little nervous when he realized that everything he’d bought only filled one cabinet. 

Eddie came out of the bathroom dripping wet, towel around his waist, and surveyed his work, hands on hips. 

“I know it’s not much, but—”

“How much Chili-Mac did you bring?” 

Richie grinned apologetically. “Sorry. It all happened so fast!”

Eddie smiled. 

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“Yeah. There’s a bunch of fishing poles in the storage closet over there. There must be a lake around somewhere.”

“Yeah, there is. Hold on, I printed out the booking info.” Eddie rummaged around in his rucksack, which he’d dropped on the kitchen table, and pulled out a couple sheets of printer paper. “This says that Pollywog Lake is to the right as you exit the cabin, past the marshy area. We’re supposed to use the deer trails to go around the big field. She says it’s full of rainbow trout.” Eddie looked up, skeptical. “Richie, I haven’t fished since I was a kid. We’re supposed to feed ourselves like that?” 

“We could use the hunting rifle and shoot a deer,” Richie suggested.

“Do you know how to use a gun? Outside of video games, I mean.” 

“Uh…”

The correct answer to that question was “kind of.” Richie had bought a revolver after the 2016 election, but he’d only been to the shooting range once or twice, and mostly kept it locked up in the safe in the house. When he had done target practice, he hadn’t been half-bad, he didn’t love the feeling. 

“The closest towns are Lowman, Idaho City, and Horseshoe Bend. We should go down there and buy as much food as we can before it’s too late.” 

“Not today, Eds, I need a nap…” 

Eddie sighed. 

“No, no, you’re right. I’m just...argh!” He started to pace, tearing around the kitchen in tight circles. “Why did this have to happen now! When everything was finally on track!” 

“I dunno, hon,” Richie said dully. A headache was slowly pulsating behind his eyes. “ Can I...I just want to…” 

“Okay, Richie. Let’s get you your nap.” 

Eddie knew why Richie had waited for his permission. They all had nightmares, Eddie included, but Richie’s were the worst. In the first few weeks, while they had been living together, but before they had been sleeping in the same bed, Eddie couldn’t count the number of times he’s woken up without knowing why, only to creep to the door and hear soft sobbing from the room next door. One night it had been particularly bad. He’d been woken by a devilish ghostly wail at half past midnight. It hadn’t even sounded like an utterance that could be made by a person. The first thought that entered Eddie’s head had been that someone was killing a cat. But when he had entered Richie’s room, there was no cat, just his best friend, hunched over in bed, biting down hard on the inside of his forearm to stifle another scream, drenched in cold nightsweat. Eddie left his bed, he left his room, he made three paces across the room, and before his brain could stop him, he had flung his arms around Richie, pried his hand from his mouth, and sunk his fingers into that nest of curls. He felt Richie’s trembling lips against his neck, felt him hold him close, and all he could do was hope that Richie wouldn’t push him away. But Richie hadn’t. One long-fingered hand pressed against the small of his back, holding him close. For almost ten minutes, Eddie held Richie and let him cry into the crook of his shoulder. When Richie had stopped shaking, Eddie pulled back to look at his face. The room was dark, but the moon was bright. Two beams of pale and cold moonlight poured through the windows, illuminating Richie’s face. Eddie, who found himself possessed of inexplicable bravery, reached up to thumb away Richie’s tears. 

“Are you all right?” he asked. 

Richie nodded. The hands around Eddie’s waist twitched. 

“I’m fine,” he said, voice shaky. “Just a nightmare.”

“What about?” 

“It’s always the same thing,” he whispered.

“Tell me.” 

Richie looked up. There was fear in his eyes, Eddie realized, dumbfounded. 

“I can’t tell you,” Richie said. 

“Yes, you can.” 

Richie sighed. 

“It was the sewer, Eds. You know.” He paused to cry a little more. The tears got caught in his eyelashes. He had pretty long eyelashes, Eddie thought. He’d always had pretty eyelashes. “I almost lost you.” 

Eddie’s heart had fluttered, dawning hope pouring into his chest like liquid sunshine. 

“Richie,” he said. It was wrong, it was inappropriate, but he couldn’t help but grin. 

“Eddie,” Richie replied, miserable. “You’re not…”

“I’m not what?”

Richie winced. 

“You’re not gay.”

Eddie grinned.

“Who says I’m not? Are you?”

Richie looked up, dumbfounded. 

“I…” He swallowed hard. “I’m in love with you.”

Eddie felt like he could laugh, but it didn’t seem right, with Richie still so upset. 

“And?”

“And what? I’m in love with you, I’m gay, Bowers was right, I’m a fucking faggot—”

“Richie.”

“I am so, so sorry, Eddie, I thought I could—”

“Richie—”

“I’ll get you a hotel, I’ll—”

“Richie!”

Richie fell silent. 

“Richie,” Eddie said slowly, with great warmth and even greater patience. “Richie, you stupid, sloppy bitch.” 

“What?”

“You dumb, oblivious, sack of shit.”

A slow smile started to spread across Richie’s face. 

“You blithering idiot.”

“Okay, now this is starting to get hurtful.”

“I have been sticking by your dumb ass, buying you ice cream to shove in your ugly, gaping mouth, jumping into your lap during every scary movie, and you’re hitting me with this ‘no homo’ bullshit now? Are you trying to insult me?” 

Richie grinned. 

“Hey, I didn’t know you were buying me ice cream ’cause you loved me, Spaghetti. I thought you were just tryin’ to shut me up.” 

“Yeah, well, that didn’t work out, did it?” 

Richie’s face was very close to his, but Eddie could tell that he was too afraid to initiate the kiss he knew they both wanted, so Eddie did it for him. Richie’s lips were soft and warm, and his kiss was scrupulously chaste and polite. They broke apart, and Eddie’s heart fluttered when he saw Richie looking up at him, starstruck. Eddie pushed back the flop of hair that was plastered sweatily to Richie’s forehead. 

“Go to sleep, Trashmouth. I’ll stand guard.” 

That night, as they slept with Richie’s back snug against Eddie’s chest so that he could feel the slow, steady rhythm of his breath, there were no nightmares. 

Three years later, as they slept in one of the twin beds in the attic of the cabin at the foot of the Sawtooth mountains, there were no nightmares either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on Twitter @dis_comrade, but my parents and pastor follow me, so if your request is particularly NSFW, you may want to just DM me. I love all of you and thank you so much for reading!


	4. Forgotten Sons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “And so as I patrol in the valley of the shadow of the tricolour  
I must fear evil, for I am but mortal and mortals can only die  
Asking questions, pleading answers from the nameless faceless watchers  
That stalk the carpeted corridors of Whitehall…”  
—Marillion, “Forgotten Sons”

Richie didn’t feel better when he woke up. It wasn’t like walking up from a nap and being groggy. He immediately felt the urge to vomit. He rolled out of bed and barely made it to the trashcan in time. It only took one heave for him to start vomiting up what looked and smelled like week-old tuna casserole. Eddie, with his unerring nose for sickness, shot up immediately, crossing the room to rub his back and run his fingers through his hair. 

“Oh, Rich. Let it all out. Are you sick?” 

Richie looked up and rolled his eyes. Eddie tsked. 

“Is it something you ate, I mean, or are you really sick?” 

“I feel really sick.” Richie let out a meaty burp and heaved one last time, producing only bile. “Oof.” 

“You’ve got a fever,” Eddie said, placing a cool hand on Richie’s forehead. “Here, let me help.” 

Eddie nocked one shoulder securely under Richie’s armpit and supported him back to the bed. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” 

The few moments that Eddie had been gone felt like an eternity. Richie had been about to tell him that it was probably just food poisoning, but it was impossible to tell if the sweat he was emitting was from a fever, or if it was just flop sweat. Eddie came back, a metal bowl in his hand. “Turn over.” 

From the bowl, Eddie pulled out a sopping washcloth. He wrung it and pressed it to Richie’s face, wiping away sweat and probably vomit. He returned the cloth to the bowl, rinsed it again, wrung it, and pressed the cool cloth to Richie’s forehead. He repeated the process over and over, wiping down his face, neck, arms, armpits, and chest to cool him down. Richie watched Eddie bending over him, his face scrunched up in an absent frown, carefully attentive, and a black, hot wave of love swept over him, so intense he thought for a moment that he might cry. It didn’t help that Eddie was bent over him, just like he had been that night in the sewer, when he’d saved Richie’s life, and pressed a smooth, fervid kiss to Richie’s mouth afterwards. 

***  
Afterwards they hadn’t discussed it. Richie had told himself that it was just a last-ditch attempt to save his life, just another instance of Eddie giving everything he had to someone else. He remembered when Eddie had het him cut his hair when they were children, how that afternoon in the clubhouse, how he’d bowed his head as Richie took his smooth brown ponytail in one hand, spread wide the poultry shears he’d swiped from his kitchen, and severed the ponytail below the rubber band holding it together. Eddie had turned and smiled, and said:

“Thanks, Rich. I mean it. Thank you.” 

Richie swallowed hard. 

“No sweat, Spaghetti.” And then, for some godforsaken reason: “It looks good. Really good, I mean.”

Eddie grinned. 

“All right. Don’t break a hand patting yourself on the back.” He sighed. “My mom’s gonna flip.” 

“You could always come live with me,” Richie suggested. “My parents are never home.” 

Eddie twisted his mouth. 

“Your parents’d be okay with you movin’ a girl in?” 

“Ah, come on. Girls have cooties. You ain’t a girl, you’re my Spaghetti.” 

The moment it had slipped out, he had felt stupid, stupid, stupid, and way too transparent, like the R + E he’d engraved on the Kissing Bridge were blazoned on his forehead. But Eddie didn’t recoil. He blushed, and gave Richie one of the tiny, private smiles he seemed to reserve for Richie and Richie alone. There was no better feeling than receiving one of those smiles. 

“I wish I could live with you,” Eddie groaned. “My mom’s been nuts.”

“More so than usual?” 

“Yeah. We got into a huge fight.”

“What about?”

Eddie grinned.

“You.” He began to mimic his mother. “‘Bethy, you don’t stop hanging out with that Tozier boy, people are going to think you’re eeeeeaaaassssy!” 

Richie laughed uneasily. 

“If only she knew,” he joked.

Eddie rolled his eyes. 

“As if.”

Yeah, Richie thought unhappily. As if.   
***  
When Richie woke up, it was dark outside. He still felt a little warm, and his mouth was dry, but his stomach had settled considerably. Eddie was balled up next to him, head pillowed on Richie’s shoulder, snoring, breathing warm breath out onto Richie’s face. He smiled, and leaned forwards to plant a kiss on the tip of his nose. Eddie woke up, snorted, and gagged theatrically. 

“Richie, gross!”

“Sorry,” he sang. “You’re too cute. I couldn’t resist.” 

Eddie wrinkled his nose, mollified. 

“Brush your teeth, and you can kiss me all you want.” 

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Richie jogged down the stairs and into the tiny bathroom. He squeezed out some Sensodyne onto his toothbrush and jammed it into his mouth. As he brushed, he stared at his reflection. The color had returned to his cheeks, and his eyes weren’t as dull as they had been towards the end of the trip. 

“You do look a lot better,” Eddie said. He was in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. 

Richie winked. 

“Who could be ill in the presence of such a fair young lad?”

Eddie scoffed.

“Yeah. Right. Must be the mountain air.”

Richie spat, rinsed his mouth, and crossed the room to take Eddie’s hands. Eddie smiled, rose up onto his tiptoes, and kissed Richie softly. Richie made a noise that would’ve otherwise embarrassed him, but he couldn’t help it. Eddie went to his head so quickly. 

“You know what we should do?” Richie asked, looking down at Eddie, who was hung around his neck, big brown eyes staring up at him with that starry look that always made Richie melt with the realization of just how lucky he was. 

“What?” 

Before he answered, Richie couldn’t help but bend down and place another kiss on Eddie’s soft, pink lips. Eddie opened his mouth eagerly, licking into Richie’s mouth, cupping the side of his face. 

“We should go out, look at the stars.” 

Eddie smiled, and when he smiled, he fair glowed. 

“I’ll grab a blanket.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick PSA: While I'm intersex, I identify as and am 99% of the time coded as female. I don't have a firsthand knowledge of the trans male experience, and though I try to run every chapter by at least two of my trans friends, everybody is different. If I ever write something that's offensive or inaccurate, just tell me, and I'll change it, no questions asked. All my love to all my readers, and check out the songs I get my epigraphs from!


	5. Fruit of the Wild Rose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The fruit of the wild rose  
Hangs here with summer gone,  
Voluptuous crimson,  
As the days become colder.  
The fruit of the wild rose,  
The fruit of the wild rose,  
Sweet and so sour on the tongue,  
Swollen and crimson,  
As the light fades and shortens,  
The thorny wild rose.  
She gave me a summer but she's gone,  
As England faces the winter…”  
—Marillion, “Fruit of the Wild Rose,” Out of the Box
> 
> Porn with feelings by a dyke English major.   
TW: child abuse, transphobia

Eddie hummed to himself as he puttered around the living room, searching for a blanket. He’d been a little surprised when Richie had suggested stargazing. He’d secretly been hoping that Richie would just bend him over the kitchen table and fuck him, but if he knew Richie, this stargazing gambit was fucking with extra steps. But Richie was a romantic asshole, and his stupid fascination with treating Eddie right. Even after Eddie had married him, Richie acted like he was vying for his heart, surprising him with candlelit dinners, hotel getaways, and bedroom adventures. The quality and volume of sex he’d had with Richie since they’d left Derry was staggering. Myra hadn’t ever touched him with sexual intent, and he’d been glad for it, but...God, he’d been missing something. 

Before, he’d been afraid to sleep with a man, afraid at what it might mean for him, but being with Richie had always made everything feel so simple. Eddie had come to him with questions, complicated questions he still didn’t have answers to, and Richie had just answered with a shrug, and a response of: “You’re my Eds, that’s all.” Like he knew who that was, even when Eddie didn’t. But, of course, Richie didn’t have the answers. All it meant was that Richie loved him, whoever, wherever, whenever. 

Eddie peeled a scratchy tartan afghan off the back of the worn leather armchair in the corner of the room and fondled it absently. Richie, his rock? Anyone else would probably laugh at the idea. Richie was so flighty, flitting from idea to idea, always hiding his true self, his true feelings behind a veil of sarcasm and stupid jokes. But that was their mistake. Everyone else, even their fellow Losers, made the mistake of listening to what Richie said. Eddie never listened to Richie. He watched what he did. He’d teased Eddie, but never about The Thing, and when they were all afraid, the true measure of one’s character, he’d never failed to place himself between Eddie and It, shielding him with his own body in Neibolt, in the sewers. 

(“Stop it! Stop it! I’m sorry! It was me, it was all me! I’m sorry!”) 

Eddie was startled out of his reverie by a kiss to the top of his head. 

“You ready?” Richie asked. 

Eddie smiled and nodded. “What were you thinking about, hon?” 

“Was it that obvious?” Eddie asked. 

Richie shrugged. “We’ve only been best friends for thirty-two years.”

“I was thinking about that time you took me home after you helped me cut my hair. What happened with my mom.” 

***

They had only been children, twelve years old, and Eddie had been so desperate to get rid of that stupid ponytail that his mother had saddled him with, and Richie had been the only one fearless or crazy enough to help him. After the initial euphoria, the exhilaration of seeing that damned ponytail lying in the dirt like a dead rat, Eddie had been terrified. His mother...it was bad enough that Eddie, then called Beth (by everyone but Richie), was hanging out with boys. God forbid he choose to be one. She didn’t know that he kept a stash of his clothes at Richie’s house, stopping on the way to school to change out of the skirts and sweaters she provided into the faded shorts and t-shirts that Richie provided. So Richie had walked him home. He had insisted, over Eddie’s protestations. 

“She won’t do nothing,” Richie said. “Not in front of me. She does, I tell my mom, my mom tells the neighborhood.”

Eddie wasn’t sure about that, but he didn’t try to dissuade Richie. When it came to things like this, when it came to Eddie, Richie was deadly stubborn. 

The moment they entered Eddie’s house, Sonia was at the door in a heartbeat. 

“Elizabeth Kaspbrak, do you have any idea of the ti—”

The moment she saw Eddie, the wooden spoon had fallen out of her hand with a clatter. Her shriek vibrated the windows and threatened to shatter Richie’s glasses. “ELIZABETH ISABELLE KASPBRAK, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF?” 

Eddie stuttered. As smart mouthed as he was out in the barrens, back talking his mother was not something that was in his repertoire. 

“I didn’t—Ma—I saw Bev—we—”

He didn’t get to finish because Sonia crossed the room and brought the spoon down hard across his right forearm. She’d hauled off again, winding up for another blow, but Richie interceded, shoving Eddie backwards. He landed on his but on the threshold, looking up at Richie’s scrawny back. 

“Mrs. K, it was me, it was all me! I’m sorry! I was messing around, and I cut it off. It was a stupid prank, Mrs. K, Edd—Elizabeth—already yelled at me, it wasn’t h-her fault.” 

Eddie almost got trampled as his mother took Richie by the ear and marched him out of the house and across the street, howling for Mrs. Tozier to come out and get her son. Soon, two voices were yelling at Richie, for almost ten solid minutes. While it was going on, Eddie wandered into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, smoothing down his newly-cropped hair and staring at his pale, pinched face while two women screamed at his best friend because of him. Was it worth it?

A red weal was already raised up on his forearm. The voices outside fell silent. Soon, his mother re-entered the house. 

“Bethy,” she said. 

Eddie trembled, and didn’t reply. 

“Bethy, I’m sorry.”

She entered the bathroom and ran a hand through his hair. “All your pretty hair. I’m so sorry.” She tutted. “I hope you’ve learned a lesson from this. This is what happens when you hang out with those boys.” 

Later, after she’d gone to bed, Eddie snuck downstairs and called Richie. He picked up after the first ring. 

“Spaghetti,” he said. He sounded cheerful enough. Relief washed over Eddie, warming him from head to toe. 

“Rich,” he whispered. “Are you okay?” 

“Fine,” Richie said. He was lying, Eddie could tell. 

“Stop lying.”

Richie heaved a crackly sigh. 

“Fine. I caught a couple good licks from Dad, but I’ll be fine within the week. I got an advantage, see. They can’t break the glasses. They’re expensive.”

Eddie bit his lip, on the edge of tears. 

“I don’t think that’s funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“No!” 

“Okay,” Richie said, cautiously. “Not funny. What about you, Eds?”

“I…”

Richie’s voice got low for a moment, and something entered into it that was almost adult and a little dangerous. 

“Did she hurt you?”

“No, Rich. Listen, I gotta go.”

Eddie hung up the phone, slid down the wall, and burst into tears.  
***  
“That’s when I realized how beautiful you were,” Richie said. They were walking out the doorway and down the steps, the blanket clutched against Eddie’s chest. Richie held a Thermos of hot cocoa he had found in one of the cabinets. 

“What?” Eddie asked. It was dark, but his cheeks were warm.

Richie nodded. “It was a bad haircut,” he said. “I had no stylist experience, and I was using poultry shears. But you were so goddamn cute, you managed to pull it off.”

“I never thanked you,” Eddie said. 

“For what?”

Eddie stopped dead, halfway up the dirt road up the rise. 

“For what? Rich, you got beat up for me!”

Richie waved a hand dismissively. 

“Ah, hell. Would’ve happened anyways. I was happy to do it, anyways.” 

Richie hardly ever talked about his childhood. Neither of his parents had been invited to their wedding. His sister had, but she didn’t show. But he had come to school with bruises, fat lips, and, one awful time, a broken collarbone, and every time he had, Eddie had been suffused with a white-hot rage that he had never felt before or since. 

They crested the hill, spread the blanket, and looked up at the sky. 

“Oh, Rich,” Eddie whispered. The sky was spread out above them like crushed velvet dotted with brilliant little gems. Venus shone in the northern sky, and Jupiter cast down its baleful eye from the west. They could even see the purple spine of the Milky Way streaking across the sky. They laid together, holding hands, staring up at the sky. The outbreak, Washington D.C, the state of the nation were all forgotten. The beauty of the night sky was astonishing. It filled the eye, delighted the senses. In that moment, Eddie was so profoundly glad to be alive. One hand snuck up to his chest to rub the scar Pennywise had left, the reddish-white rope of scar tissue that slashed diagonally across his chest that never seemed to have fully healed. It still tugged and ached and occasionally emitted stabbing pains that robbed him of his breath, like it was trying to remind him of that night in the sewers. But, for now, it was quiet, and he was right next to Richie, overcome with love and wonder. 

He was still horny, of course. That hadn’t changed. But the urgency had receded. There were days when he felt like he was living on borrowed time, that every second he had managed to steal since the sewers was some kind of clerical error that the universe would eventually catch on to. It was difficult for him to accept that there would be time to do all the things he wanted to do, to be in love. To court. 

“Look,” Eddie said, pointing at the sky. “The Southern Cross.” 

“Oh yeah? What else do you see?”

“Well, there’s Cygnus. Pisces. Orion. Cassiopeia. Pegasus. I think that’s Cancer, over there. And see that one, right by the horizon? That’s Sagittarius.”

“Hmm,” Richie mused. “I don’t see any shapes, but there’s so many of them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen stars like these.” 

For thirty minutes they laid there, not speaking, just sitting in the road and drinking in the beauty of the sky. Then, as he was wont to do, Richie started talking. 

“If we had world enough and time,  
This coyness, Eddie, were no crime.   
We would sit down and think which way  
To walk and pass our long love's day.  
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side  
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide  
Of Humber would complain. I would  
Love you ten years before the Flood,  
And you should, if you please, refuse  
Till the conversion of the Jews.  
My vegetable love should grow  
Vaster than empires, and more slow;  
An hundred years should go to praise  
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;  
Two hundred to adore each breast,  
But thirty thousand to the rest;  
An age at least to every part,  
And the last age should show your heart.  
For, Eddie, you deserve this state,  
Nor would I love at lower rate.” 

It was one of their old favorites. Back when they were still in school, Richie had gotten a present from an aunt one Christmas: a poetry anthology. He had fallen in love with it, starring his favorite selections and reading them long into the night with a stolen flashlight. Eddie was the only Loser that he had trusted with that knowledge. Many afternoons, they had stolen away into the Barrens, found some secluded spot, and Eddie had provided a patient audience for Richie’s recitations. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was a selection he had returned to, day after day. Almost like he was trying to tell me something, Eddie thought, smiling to himself. The witty, slick, and knavish tone made Richie’s quick-talking and sly delivery particularly apt, and the sincerity with which he spoke always made Eddie’s heart pitter-patter. 

“But at my back I always hear  
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;  
And yonder all before us lie  
Deserts of vast eternity.  
Thy beauty shall no more be found,  
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound  
My echoing song: then worms shall try  
That long preserved virginity,  
And your quaint honour turn to dust,  
And into ashes all my lust:  
The grave's a fine and private place,  
But none, I think, do there embrace.”

At this point, Richie did what he always did, which was to take Eddie by the hand, stand up, and then kneel in front of him like a supplicating knight before his betrothed. 

“Now therefore, while the youthful hue  
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,  
And while thy willing soul transpires  
At every pore with instant fires,  
Now let us sport us while we may,  
And now, like amorous birds of prey,  
Rather at once our time devour  
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.  
Let us roll all our strength and all  
Our sweetness up into one ball,  
And tear our pleasures with rough strife  
Through the iron gates of life:  
Thus, though we cannot make our sun  
Stand still, yet we will make him run!” 

Richie finished with a dramatic flourish, and Eddie, laughing softly at his antics, grabbed his hand and pulled him close. 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get me to suck your dick,” he whispered. 

Richie squeezed him back. “You don’t have to. I’ll give you the blowjob, if you want. Or we could just cuddle. I don’t know. I just want to be close to you.” 

“Richie,” Eddie said, fondly, but with great exasperation. “When have I ever wanted to just cuddle with you?” 

A few moments later, Richie was on his back, staring up at the sky, while Eddie crouched over him on all fours and began undoing his jeans with practiced, efficient motions. The moment Eddie pulled his dick out, Richie arched his back and hissed out a string of oaths. 

Richie’s dick was gorgeous, about seven inches and almost as thick as Eddie’s wrist. The first time he’d seen it he’d been a bit intimidated. He’d never sucked a dick before, and putting that thing down his windpipe seemed like a “famous last words” type scenario. But Richie had been patient, and oh-so-gentlemanly, and once they’d gotten started, Eddie’s arousal had been strong enough to reduce any insecurities about his own inexperience to background noise. It had also helped that Richie had been nervous, too. He had fingered Eddie open so slowly and carefully, like he was afraid of hurting him, that Eddie had had to beg him for every finger and, afterwards, for every inch. He had almost laughed. As if Richie could ever hurt him. As if something he wanted this much, for this long, could ever be painful. 

Three years had passed between then and now, and Eddie’s hands, lips, and tongue had been over every inch of Richie, especially his cock, and Eddie had memorized every vein, fold, and freckle. He wrapped his lips against the head, flicking his tongue into the slit, and was rewarded with a blurt of precum and a gasp of his name. Richie’s hands flew to Eddie’s head, digging into his hair, urging him deeper. Eddie complied with alacrity, relaxing his jaw so that Richie slipped sinfully deeper, almost to the root, and started to bob his head. He pressed his tongue tighter against the underside of Richie’s cock, smiling as he heard Richie moan. 

“Oh, Eddie—Eds, oh fuck—oh, please—” 

Eddie pulled off for a moment to look up at Richie. 

“You can hold my head down, Rich. I want you to play a little rough.” 

“Oh—are you—”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Richie, who always double-checked, no matter how much he wanted what was being offered. Eddie felt a warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with the desire coursing through his veins. 

He dived back down, taking Richie back into his throat, as Richie once more took hold of his head. Gently, slowly, he pressed Eddie down, until the final two inches of his cock were sheathed in Eddie’s throat. It was dark, but Eddie could still see the expression on Richie’s face. Eddie gagged around the dock in his throat, keeping his eyes on Richie. Eddie was so wet that he could feel his juices plastering his briefs to his thighs. After a few moments, Richie pulled back, stroking Eddie’s face and petting his hair, smoothing it out of his eyes. 

“Good boy. You’re doing so well. I’m so close.” 

Praise. Even this far gone, Richie remembered the praise thing. God, by the time they were through, the briefs he was wearing might be unsalvageable. After allowing Eddie to take a few deep breaths, Richie slid back in. He was close, Eddie could tell. Reasserting control, Eddie took Richie into his throat and started bobbing up and down. He considered sliding a hand into his own pants and getting himself off, but then remembered Richie’s offer of a blowjob and dismissed the idea. If he waited, he might get to sit on Richie’s face, which was always a treat. 

“Ohhh—Eddie—”

That broken moan was all the warning Eddie got. He pulled off to the tip, wrapping his lips around the sensitive head, working the shaft with a hand, and was quickly rewarded with a mouthful of Richie’s load. Richie pulled him up so that they were face to face, bullying his way into Eddie’s mouth and kissing him like they were teenagers again, hiding under the bleachers or from Eddie’s mother. Eddie pulled away with a happy laugh that reverberated in the still mountain air. He could see Richie’s face in the pale moonlight: lovestruck, awed, joyful. 

“I love you,” he said softly. 

Richie didn’t hesitate for a moment.

“I love you more.” 

They were so dazed and caught up in each other that they didn’t hear the tires crunching on the dirt road until they were almost on top of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please feel free to share! Nice comments make my entire life, cure my depression, clear my skin, and water my crops :)


	6. White Feather

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Well, I hit the streets back in ’81,  
Found a heart in the gutter and a poet's crown.  
I felt barbed wire kisses and icicle tears  
Where have I been for all these years?  
I saw political intrigue, political lies  
Gonna wipe those smiles of self-satisfaction from their eyes!  
I won’t wear your white feather  
I won’t carry your white flag  
I won’t swear behind no nation,  
But I'm proud to own my heart.”  
—Marillion, “White Feather,” Misplaced Childhood

The moment he walked into her Seattle office, Marian Little knew her life would never be the same. He wasn't a beautiful dame, but reality doesn’t always respect the constraints of genre. Nevertheless, it had been a slow, rainy day, and not a single soul had entered the Queen Anne offices of Little and Associates, Attorneys at Law since two o’ clock the previous afternoon. It was a good thing. Most of Marian’s clients were abuse victims. That was her speciality, and thus, it would’ve been a bit gauche for her to want to have people beating down her door. Moreover, she’d gone through a breast reduction surgery only seven days ago, and the Tylenol and codeine tablets she’d been prescribed weren’t exactly taking the edge off. She needed something to take her mind off the tug of her stitches besides the REO Speedwagon playing on the radio and the game of chess on her desktop. Then her deskphone had crackled to life. 

“Marian, someone’s here for you.”

“Send ’em in.”

So Marian took her feet off the desk, straightened her clothes, shuffled some papers, and tried to look busy when Eddie Kaspbrak walked into her office. He slunk in quietly, like he had half a mind to turn tail and book it out of there. 

“Hi,” she said. “Marian Little, Attorney at Law. Did you know that you have rights? The Constitution says so, and so do I.” 

He didn’t reply, just looked at her nervously. “That usually kills. Little Saul Goodman, right? Better Call Saul? Anyhow, uh, why don’t you tell me why you’re here?” 

“I want a divorce,” he said firmly. 

“Great. That’s what I do. What’s your name?” 

“Edward Kasprak.”

“Date of birth?” 

“December 13, 1979.” 

After Marian finished asking him about the minutiae, they just sat there, staring at each other. Marian sighed.

“Okay. Look. I can see that you’re nervous, so I’m gonna do something that usually seems to help my more squirrely clients. I’m gonna tell you about how I almost fell into the Ballard Locks when I was nine. I was there with my family…” 

She went through the story, which had been told by her and to her hundreds of times, while sparing no detail. She pantomimed important moments, even earning a laugh from Eddie when she mimicked her great-grandmother’s thick Polish accent. When she was finished, she sat back, and motioned at Eddie. “So. Feel better?” 

He nodded. 

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I got all kinds of time.” 

“All right.” He breathed out and leaned forwards. “I guess it all started with my mother.” 

“It often does.”

He’d peered up at her, suspicious, to see if she was making fun of him, but she was absolutely earnest. Bolstered a bit by her efforts at putting him at ease, he let slip the entire sorry story. He’d run away from an emotionally abusive mother only to land in New York in the hands of a woman who saw him only as an easy-to-subjugate paycheck. He’d run off to his small hometown for a high school reunion, only to encounter the boy he’d loved since childhood, and who had loved him. Their feelings hadn’t changed, and they had become lovers. 

“I couldn’t go back,” he said. “It was...it was tolerable, back before I knew what was possible. But when I felt what I felt for Richie, and the way he treated me, what it was like when we were together…” He trailed off. “I just couldn’t go back.”

Marian nodded. 

“So you want a divorce.” 

“Yes.”

“On what terms?”

“What do you mean?”

Marian shifted in her chair, leaning forwards and placing her elbows on the desk.

“The path of least resistance is to get a divorce on any terms. Give her everything in exchange for cutting the cord painlessly. It’s a conciliatory approach.” 

“You think I should let her keep all my money?” 

Marian sighed.

“No. The lawyer in me says yes, but I say no. It’s offensive to my sensibilities to counsel you to give money to an abuser. It would probably get ugly. She will put out your dirty laundry. She’ll fight you every step of the way, drag you through the mud, extort you, blackmail you. But for me, it’s the principle of the thing. Is that the high road? No. Is it born out of the ridiculous sense of obstinacy and a refusal to give up, no matter how stupid, costly, or pointless the battle, that was instilled in my by my crazy parents? Probably. But for me, at least, it would be worth it.”

Eddie narrowed his eyes.

“How do I know you’re not just trying to get more billable hours from me?” 

“Because if we surrender, you pay me something, and you walk away with nothing. We fight, and I only get paid if you win.”

“How much?” 

“First things first. How did you get my name?”

Eddie hesitated. 

“I asked a Facebook group of people who had divorced their controlling spouses which lawyers they’d used. You came up. A lot. They said you were good. So I looked you up. You’ve won nineteen out of the twenty cases you’ve tried, and you only lost that one because your client sandbagged you, which I’m not planning to do.”

“You’re a meticulous individual, aren’t you?” Marian asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. She got up from behind the desk to pull some papers from a filing cabinet. “That’s good. It’ll serve you well. Here’s the deal. We win, you pay me seven percent of all liquid assets seized. That’s a flat rate. No interest, no per diem. We lose, I get nothing.”

“Liquid assets...what about material assets?”

“House, cars...forget ’em. Sounds complicated. Just calculate seven percent of whatever gets transferred into your bank account.” 

“How rich do you think I am?” Eddie asked suspiciously. 

“Moderately wealthy.” 

He shrugged.

“You’re right, I guess.”

“I often am.”

***

Despite her citizenship, she’d been repulsed at the border. News of the epidemic had spread fast, and Canada wasn’t rolling the dice on letting Americans in until they had some answers about what exactly was killing people along the West Coast. She had to lay low near the Pont-Lac-Champlain border crossing until midnight and steal across, scuffed black heels catching in the yellowing grass by the lakeside. She ran for three miles, until she was safely inside the borders of Quebec, then hitchhiked to Montreal, hopped onto the Metro, and emerged at Place d’Armes, exiting towards Chinatown. 

What she didn’t know, and what the guards at the border had just found out, was that the Plague, as those in the know had begun to uncreatively call it, was already incubating in the Pierre-Elliot Trudeau International Airport. Nobody knew that the streets of the city would be alive with Rotters by noon tomorrow. For now, however, Marian walked alone in a chilly, yet pleasant Quebec night, quite at peace. She cut a striking figure, but she didn’t pay the rubberneckers mind. Her stockings were run, and her skirt and blouse were quite dirty, and she must’ve looked quite a mess. Her exodus from Seattle hadn’t been easy. 

She climbed the winding metal stairs to the apartment above the coffee shop on Rue Bleury. When she reached the door, she reached into her shirt pocket, withdrew the key, and unlocked the door. The inside was dark and quiet. She flicked on the light, walking down the hallway, and called out:

“Bernard? Etes-vous ici?” 

No reply. 

“Bernard, je m’appelle Marian, je suis la fille de Roxanne. Souvenez-vous ma mere?” The kitchen was empty, and there was no sign of Bernard. “Souvenez mes amis, Eddie et Richie?” 

Bernard was in the bedroom, but he wasn’t Bernard anymore. He’d come in on a flight from Vancouver only an hour ago, and the Plague had incubated when he was on the plane. The Plague had spread quickly from Seattle to Burnaby and Vancouver when terrified Seattleites had fled across the border. He growled at her, shambling forwards, teeth bared. The skin had sloughed off of his face and hung by his neck, like a jester’s fringe. Before he could bury his teeth in her neck, she fetched him a staggering blow with the hammer she had tucked into her belt, laying him flat. Before he could struggle upwards, she hauled off and hit him once more on the temple, killing him instantly. She sighed. The caretaker had been a nice guy, enamored of her mother and his grandson, a high school football star in Burnaby. 

She was alone in the apartment now. The first thing she did was grab the landline and call her mother. She let it ring for almost a minute, hung up, and then called again. Her mother picked up on the third ring.

“Marian.”

Marian let out a quick breath, relieved. She hadn’t expected the Agent Dr. Roxanne Little to be dead, exactly, but it was still good to hear her voice. She sounded a little stressed—there was a great deal of tension in her voice. She had always talked faster when she was under pressure, and now her words rattled out fast, like bullets from a machine gun, or notes from a steel drum. 

“Mom. Where are you?” 

“We’ve taken over the Library of Congress. We’re safe.”

“Who’s ‘we?’” 

“Me. Your mom. Your brother. Two of my FBI colleagues. My trainee. Five of my fellow doctors.” 

“How’s Booker?” 

Booker was her younger brother. He was an art student, only nineteen years old. 

“Worried about you,” Roxanne said. Marian knew what that meant. Nothing her mother said ever meant just one thing. She spoke in palimpsests. 

Worried about you:  
-Booker is melting down, and it’s partly your fault.  
-We’re worried, too.   
-Hurry up.

“Bernard’s dead. He was infected.” Marian’s voice was ragged. She didn’t want to show weakness, but this was a lot, and she didn’t think she could be blamed for a little panic. “Mom, what is this?” 

“It’s a prion disease,” Roxanne said. She switched into attending-physician mode. Marian could hear her pacing. “I’ve only managed to examine two brains, but both exhibited spongiform encephalopathy. I thought it was a recurrence of the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s we saw in the UK during the mad cow disease epidemic, but it’s much more aggressive. It’s kuru, Marian.”

“Kuru?”

“It’s a prion disease endemic among certain tribes in Papua New Guinea, linked to the practice of endocannibalism. Eating the dead was thought to return their life force to the people they had left behind. Women and children consumed the brains, which had the highest concentration of pathogenic prions. The disease eats away at the brain, eventually turning it into Swiss cheese. Sufferers lose the ability to control their tremors, walk on their own, and exhibit emotional instability, irrational beliefs, and an inability to control their impulses. Some exhibit violent behavior or pathogenic laughter. But none of this makes sense, because kuru has an incubation period of ten to thirteen years. These people are devolving within days.” 

“If you know what it is, can you fix it?” 

“No.” 

Marian fell silent for a moment. She wiped her sweaty hands on her skirt and took a shuddering breath.

“No, as in not now? Do you need...supplies?”

“No, as in never.”

Marian sniffed. Her skin was cold and crawling, her chest was tight, and her hands shook. Her eyes burned with tears of frustration.

“Mom—”

“There’s nothing that can be done.”

“Why? I mean, antivirals, or—”

“No. Prions aren’t bacteria. They aren’t even viruses. They can’t be killed because they’re not alive.”

Marian cradled her pounding head in one hand. “Prions are misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to fold improperly and create aggregates of amyloids in infected brain tissue. They are resistant to chemical and physical denaturation. They can’t be cleaned away or cooked off. Prion diseases are always neurological, always degenerative, and always fatal. They have no known treatments. Based on the behavior that I’ve seen, it’s likely that this is a biological weapon engineered for the purpose of inciting mass chaos or extinction.” 

“H-how is it transmitted?”

“Blood to blood contact. Every time I’ve seen a person turn, it’s been because of a bite from another Infected. The disease causes bleeding sores within the mouths of the people it infects. It’s a genius mechanism to increase the rate of successful transmission.” 

“How can we protect ourselves?” 

“Don’t get bit.” 

Marian sat, stunned, listening to her mother’s crackly breathing. It wasn’t like she’d been expecting comfort. Roxanne Little had never been the “spoonful of sugar” type, but the gravity and brutality of the situation laid out in front of her was almost too much to bear. 

“Where are you?” Roxanne finally asked.

“Montreal.” 

“Why? That’s out of your way. You were supposed to come straight here.” Roxanne’s voice was strained and low. The voice of a woman at the end of her rope. 

“I had to pick something up.”

“What? What was so goddamn important—” 

“Files,” Marian said. “Papers. Evidence. Whatever you want to call it. I made a promise to a client—”

“They’re dead, Marian!” 

Marian pushed on, ignoring the outburst. 

“I made a promise to a client that when I had enough evidence, I’d make sure his ex was prosecuted. I can’t do that without my records.” 

“Your client is dead,” Roxanne said, voice studiously calm. “His ex is dead. The prosecutors you would’ve taken that case to are dead. So are the judges. So are the juries. Don’t you get it? There’s no after this!” 

“He’s not dead,” Marian said stubbornly. “I called him. He picked up.”

“How long ago?” 

“Twenty four hours.”

“Marian.”

“No—”

“Marian. It’s over.” 

“What’s over?” Marian yelled. Her voice broke horribly, and she cringed in an agony of embarrassment and frustration. This was the last time she wanted to show weakness. Not now. Not in front of her mother. 

“Everything.”

They were both silent for a few moments. “Come to D.C,” Roxanne finally whispered. “Your mom needs you. Your brother needs you.”

What about you? Marian wanted to ask, but she didn’t. She wasn’t ready for the answer. 

“We’ve got a good setup here. Guns. Ammo. Food and water. We’ll be safe for the time being.” 

Marian hesitated. The papers were just a stopgap. They weren’t what she really wanted, which was her friends. 

“If I find—”

“No,” Roxanne said sharply. “You leave for D.C tomorrow. Once we get there, we’ll get an emergency broadcast up and running. If they receive it, they’ll find us. But you cannot run all over the country looking for them. Do you even know what state they’re in?”

“They were in Idaho when I called,” Marian said. “Somewhere in the mountains. The signal was bad.”

“Good. That’s a good place for them. If they’re in an isolated area, then they probably won’t run into any rotters.” 

“You’re right,” Marian said. “God damn it, you’re right.”

“I often am,” her mother replied. “I often am.”


	7. Enlightenment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Entwined in his arms  
Spinning around and submarine beneath the deep of him  
Climbing the forks of the lightning  
Building a rod for my back it's all right, it's all right 
> 
> I feel...  
Dizzy to fever with this love  
The blues and the greys are waved away inside a day with him  
Riding the forks of the lightning  
Feeling the sparks along my back, it's all right, it's all right.
> 
> I thought I was born to take and to damage  
But I'm giving and healing and feeling  
Ultramarine and ultra-serene  
Climbing the forks of the lightning  
He told me today: it'll be okay it's all right, it's all right…”  
—“Enlightenment,” Marillion, marillion.com

After leaving Derry, Richie followed Eddie back to New York where they began the very long, drawn-out process of starting to think about maybe divorcing Myra. Richie didn’t want to rush him. Everything Eddie did was a calculation, and he had to feel safe before taking the leap. So for a month, while Marian gathered evidence, Richie was a side chick. He was living off his savings in a nice hotel in Brooklyn three blocks from Eddie’s apartment. Every afternoon, he would wait for Eddie to make a brief appearance at home, then duck out and head to the hotel. The moment Richie heard the key in the door, he was up to ambush Eddie, pulling him inside and planting a deep kiss on those puffy pink lips, holding him tight. Every afternoon, Eddie would reach up and grab Richie around the waist, kissing him back with what Richie hoped he wasn’t misreading as desperation. Some days, Eddie would beg Richie to fuck him the moment he entered the room, like he needed the weight of Richie’s cock in his ass to pin him down, reminding him how desperately he was loved. Like he needed the soreness, the ache to remind him of what was waiting for him while he went to sleep in the twin bed in his two-bedroom with his wife next door. Sometimes he would fuck Richie, cautiously at first, then with increasing abandon when it became evident that he wasn’t going to break. Sometimes they just laid together, sometimes in silence, listening to the beating of each other’s hearts, sometimes chatting about stupid, silly things, their childhoods, Richie’s career, music, and so on. 

One night, near the end of the near-month of lies, they were lying together after round two. Richie had run to the bathroom for a hand towel, and Eddie had raised his hips to allow him to slip it underneath him to catch the globs of semen dripping from Eddie’s ass. Eddie draped an arm over Richie, curling up next to him. “Can I ask you a question?” 

“Sure.” 

“Do you think we’ll ever have kids?” 

Richie turned to Eddie, surprised. 

“I guess I never thought about it. You’d be an amazing dad.” 

“So would you.”

Richie laughed.

“I’m not joking!” 

“You remember that kid at the restaurant? Not exactly World’s Greatest Dad material, Eds. Not to mention my trashmouth.”

Eddie waved him off airily. 

“We all swore as kids, and we turned out okay.”

“Well, you did. I’m not sure about the rest of us.” 

Eddie rolled his eyes. 

“Yeah, sure. Me, a hypochondriac, cheating, soon-to-be divorce. I’m sure my mother is very proud.” 

Richie couldn’t let that stand, so he rolled over and wrapped Eddie in his arms, giving him a deep soul-kiss. Eddie groaned and kissed him back, slender fingers deep in his hair. 

“Were you thinking about adoption?” 

Eddie hmmed noncommittally. 

“Maybe. I’m not sure. It’d be nice to have a little Richie Tozier running around. It wouldn’t be easy. I mean, I’d have to...but it might be worth it, you know? I mean, how many people have a story like ours? A love like ours? It might be really beautiful to bring a child into this world who was created out of what we feel for each other. Is it crazy to...to daydream about that?” 

“No,” Richie mused. He played with Eddie’s hair gently, smoothing it back from his forehead. “It’s not crazy.” He kissed his temple. “I just have one question.”

“What?”

“You don’t think one of me is enough?” 

Eddie snorted and shoved Richie. 

“Fuck you.” 

Richie laughed, a sound of pure joy, and pulled Eddie on top of him so that he was straddling his waist.

“No way. It’s not crazy. It’s nice. I think you’d be a fantastic father. And one day, when all of this is over...but until then...there was talk of fucking me?” 

Eddie wrinkled his nose and tried to look serious, but it didn’t last. After a few moments, he burst into peals of infectious laughter. 

***

Marian was a realist, and because of that, she didn’t ask Richie and Eddie to stop sleeping together. A client that tells you an unfortunate truth is better than a client that tells you a comforting lie. 

“Sure. Best-case scenario, you’re a pure victim. No hanky-panky. But true love—we can work with that. Do you know what I mean when I say ‘star-crossed lovers?’”

“Yes, of course,” Eddie had said.

“I’m not sure that you do. In colloquial use, it means that you’re destined to be together. But Shakespeare used the phrase to describe a pair of lovers plagued by ill fortune, who had made the stars vexed with them. People love true love, and if we can sell it to them, they’ll want to do everything they can to remove the obstacles between you two and your happily ever after.”

She’d rented an office in Newark and flown out to conduct the case in situ. Normally, she would’ve hired a local paralegal to do the case prep, but she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. It would be hard enough to convince a jury that a woman could abuse a man. Couple that with transphobia and homophobia—well. She wanted all the evidence that she could get her hands on.

The first time Richie had met her had been at LaGuardia. Eddie had insisted on picking her up, since she’d gone through the trouble of flying out to hold their hands through the process. She’d turned up in the baggage claim, hair down, wearing an orange blouse and faded boot-cut jeans, and all Richie had been able to think was “Jesus, she looks young!” 

She was young. She was a young litigant, only twenty-six, but she’d been admitted to the University of Washington at sixteen and passed the bar exam at twenty. She’d wbeen practicing law for five years. She’d only been on her own for the past six months, but she’d already accrued an impressive record. She had managed to win favorable terms for all but one of her clients, extracting alimony from seventeen out of twenty exes and securing the return of assets for eighteen. She was holding a brown carpet bag. 

“Welcome to New York,” Eddie said. “How are you?”

She gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “Knackered, as they would say across the pond. You didn’t have to come pick me up. I could’ve taken the train.”

“It’s the least I could do. You’ve been very accommodating.” 

She sat in the backseat of Eddie’s car as they drove over the bridge into Jersey. Her mouth was contorted into a thoughtful frown. Eddie, who was driving, adjusted his rearview mirror so that he could get a good look at her face. 

“So you’re Richie,” she mused. 

Richie gagged on the mouthful of coffee that he’d just taken. He spat it out into the cup, and started hacking up a lung. Eddie rolled his eyes, but Richie could’ve sworn he saw a tiny smile on his lips. The kind of smile that said that he didn’t want to encourage Richie’s antics, but that he couldn’t help but find them endearing. 

“Yeah,” he finally gasped. “That’s me.” 

“Have I seen you somewhere?”

“I used to be on TV.”

“Ah.” 

When they let her out in front of the Ramada in Newark, she was a little unsteady. The first thing that Richie thought was that she was drunk. Eddie rushed up to grab her by the upper arm. 

“Are you all right?” he asked. Marian pressed a hand to her forehead. 

“I’m fine.” A beat. “It’s a migraine. It’ll pass. I just need to sleep.” Then, almost reluctantly: “Thanks for not making me take the train.” 

“You’re sure you’re all right?” 

She nodded. “Before I go—you need to hear me. Your wife...don’t tell her you’re filing for divorce.” She swayed a little, but her voice was clear, if a little strained. “Don’t take anything she gives you.” 

Eddie nodded. “No medication. Nothing. You hear?”

“Yes. Loud and clear.” 

“I won’t tell you this will be easy,” she said. She swayed drunkenly one more time, then lowered her hand and looked at Eddie. “Look after each other.” 

Richie clung numbly to Eddie’s hand. Outside the hotel awning, a cold drizzle of rain was falling. 

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yesyesyes.” 

***  
Three weeks, it took Marian to get her affairs in order. Three weeks of desperate stolen kisses behind closed doors, of avid clenches of hands on hips, white knuckles bearing down in the heights of passion. Three weeks of Eddie living under Myra’s sterile, reptilian, anatomizing gaze. On the twenty-first day, Marian summoned them to her office. She was sitting behind her desk. A tall, slender woman stood beside her. She looked like she was in her thirties, with long, dark, wavy hair. A slender streak of white wended its way from her roots to the ends. A teardrop- shaped scar an inch or so deep fissured her left cheek. She and Marian had the same luminous blue eyes. 

“Gentlemen,” Marian said. “I haven’t hired a medical consultant yet, so I decided to go within the family. My mother is a medical doctor board certified in psychiatry, diagnostics, and emergency medicine. I needed someone to check out your prescriptions. I had a sneaking suspicion that your health issues might be, shall we say...chemically abetted. Doctor Little?”

Doctor Roxanne Little rolled her eyes briefly at her daughter’s formality. “Sure. You have three prescriptions here. One is labeled Zofran, one is labeled Prozac, one is labeled Xanax, and one is labeled Benadryl. However, the pills inside don’t match the labels.” Doctor Little cracked open the Xanax bottle and shook out the pills. “This is a medication called cisapride, trade name Prepulsid. It’s used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease, but it’s very hard to obtain because of the side effects.” 

“Side effects? Gastro-what?” 

“Yeah. Cisapride can cause heart arrhythmias, so it’s only used in severe cases after at least three other medications have been tried.” She put the bottle down. “Next. This Benadryl isn’t Benadryl. It’s vigabatrin. Are you epileptic?” 

“N-no.”

“Well, that’s bad, then, because it can cause retinal deterioration in up to 50% of patients. The Prozac is a drug called felbamate, which is another anticonvulsant, which can cause aplastic anemia and liver damage. Finally, this Zofran is really a Parkinson’s treatment that can cause severe liver toxicity. It’s my professional opinion, both as a doctor who is board-certified in diagnostic medicine and as a federal agent, that your wife has been poisoning you.”

Eddie was white as a sheet. 

“Is he going to be okay?” Richie asked.

“Frankly, it’s a miracle you’re still vertical, but if you’re not dead yet, you’ll be fine. Don’t take anything she gives you, and for the love of god, have someone take a look at your liver. I’d stay away from acetaminophen and alcohol until someone tells you you’re in good working condition. I’ll write you a referral diagnostic workup at Strong Memorial in Rochester.” 

“That’s five hours away!” 

“Exactly. I don’t know where she got these pills. You said she’s a shut-in. That tells me that every doctor, every pharmacy, every hospital in the city is suspect.”

“You don’t think you’re a little paranoid?” Richie asked 

Agent Roxanne Little, M.D, P.h.D flashed him a piercing stare. Eddie suppressed a snicker. 

“Perhaps. But you don’t do what I do for as long as I’ve done it without getting a little paranoid. And I haven’t died yet, so it must be working.” 

“Better safe than sorry,” Marian said. 

“I’m inclined to agree,” Richie agreed. 

Marian crossed her legs and stretched, wincing. “Go. Day after tomorrow. After that, I’ll serve her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always thank you so much for reading, and I love, love, love your thoughts and comments.


	8. Jigsaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Stand straight   
Look me in the eye and say goodbye   
Stand straight   
We've drifted past the point of reasons why   
Yesterday starts tomorrow, tomorrow starts today   
And the problem always seems to be   
We're picking up the pieces on the ricochet…”  
—Marillion, “Jigsaw,” from Fugazi

“Oh my God!” someone shouted. It was a woman’s voice, high-strung and wrought. “Girls, cover your eyes!” 

“Oh, shut up!” someone else yelled. Another woman, but this voice was lower and more hoarse. 

Eddie sat up, hurriedly wiping his mouth and arranging his clothes so that it would be a little less obvious that he’d been sucking dick. Richie tucked himself back into his hants and zipped up. 

“What’s going on?” A third voice, male this time. 

“Terri, for chrissakes.” The second woman got out of the car, boots crunching on the gravel. From what they could see of her, she was young, maybe nineteen or twenty. “Hey, I remember you two. Airbnb. Aren’t you a little early?” She held out a hand to shake, and Eddie took it. 

“Eddie Kaspbrak-Tozier.” 

“Joy Gibson. My parents Ryan and Suzanne are in the car. Guess we got the same idea.” 

“Yeah, I guess so. We can—” 

“I won’t have my kids—”

“Terri, shut up!” Joy turned back to them. “Guess you opened the place up for us. Why don’t we get back inside, and we can talk?” 

Under the gas lights of the cabin, Joy turned out to be closer to twenty-five than twenty. Her parents were in their forties. Suzanne was short and mousy, and Ryan was tall, skinny, and bald. Terri, Ryan’s cousin, was tall and blonde, and she hurried her two young daughters up to the attic right away. 

“Sorry,” Joy said. “She’s a cunt.”

“Joy,” Suzanne chastized. 

Joy scowled, then whipped around. 

“Wait. Have I seen you before?” 

“I used to be on TV,” Richie said.

“No, no. Not you. You.” She pointed at Eddie. “I’m a crime reporter. Did you—”

“I’m not a criminal,” Eddie said hurriedly. “You must be—”

“No, no, you weren’t. You were a victim, or…” She snapped her fingers. “Hold it. You were Marian’s client, weren’t you? Do you know her?” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Weren’t you the plaintiff in that case she filed against that woman in New York? It was a landmark case, all over the news. That doctor got his license pulled, people marched to get her indicted, the jury ended up awarding you damages...hell, that case made her a household name in the DV community. I covered the whole thing.” 

On the paper was a sketch of Marian Little, Esq. Above was written WANTED ALIVE IN NEW YORK CITY: MARIAN R. LITTLE. REWARD OFFERED IN SUPPLIES AND MEDICATION. 

“Medication?” Eddie said. 

“Aww, geez,” Richie groaned. 

“Do you know something I don’t?” Joy asked. 

“Yeah,” Eddie said, going for his coat. “It’s my ex. She’s never forgiven Marian for taking all my money back. She destroyed her in that courtroom. Nobody ever stood up to her like that before, much less me. Marian helped. So did Richie. This is revenge.” 

“Eddie, where are you going?”

“What do you mean, where am I going? We have to warn her!” 

“Eddie, no! Are you crazy? We just got here!” 

“Joy, what’s it like out there?” 

Joy sighed. Her red hair was tied back in a low ponytail, and she had dark circles under her eyes. There were scratches all over her forearms, Eddie realized with a sinking feeling. They looked like fingernail marks. 

“Rough,” she said. “The infected are easy to outrun. It’s the people. They’ve gone nuts. Marauders, looters...Boise is a war zone. It would be crazy to just go out there and look for someone. You don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

“Where were you when you found this?” 

“Newark. But—”

“Then there’s still time. And we know where she’s going.” 

Richie opened his mouth to argue, but he’d known Eddie long enough to know when he had a chance of winning, and when he was just getting himself in trouble. 

“Joy,” Eddie said. “You guys crossed the country. How?”

Ryan came forwards. 

“Well, if you insist on leaving—”

“We do.”

“Then you should take I-80 to 1-70. Avoid Boise, and cut south to Wyoming. Straight through Nebraska and Iowa, then south through Indiana and Illinois. Make sure to avoid Chicago. Decatur might be safe, but I’m not sure. Keep fifty miles between you and Indianapolis if you value your life. Where are you going?”

“D.C.” 

“Okay. Then you’re going to want to go straight through Ohio to cut across the corner of Pennsylvania, then east into Maryland. Scavenge rest areas. Avoid cities. Even small towns can have dangerous people.” He shook his head. “You must be crazy. The roads aren’t good. There are cars all over the place, some places are blocked off, it’s a real cluster. We barely made it through Colorado in one piece. Vail is an oasis, but Denver is a war zone. I never thought things would fall apart so fast.” 

“Some of us have been preparing,” Terri said. She’d emerged from the bedroom to bustle around the kitchen, cataloging the supplies Richie had put in the cabinet. 

“Oh, shut it,” Ryan muttered. Suzanne elbowed him.

“Hey, Terri, if you think this is God’s work, why don’t you drive back to Boise and go get bit by some of His servants?” Joy asked. 

“Hey. Where did you leave from?” 

“Me? Boston. My parents were in Jersey. They drove up to find me when it started. Things went south, fast.”

“You hear of some sort of group in D.C? Survivors?” 

She shook her head. 

“Wouldn’t know. They ain’t exactly sending out e-mail bulletins. There was a radio station, though.” 

“Oh, hell yes,” Ryan said. “That was crazy. Static, all around the dial. Except for LVRS 100.3.”

“LVRS?” Richie asked. 

“Call letters,” Ryan clarified. “Well, kind of. Nobody was calling in. It was a recorded message, on repeat. Just somebody saying ‘We are the Leavers,’ then a bunch of numbers. Hang on, I think I wrote them down. 38.888684, -77.006913. Whatever that means.”

“I told you, they’re coordinates,” Joy said. “For the Library of Congress. I looked it up on the map.” 

“She was right,” Eddie said. “Washington, D.C. It is safe.”

“That’s a big leap,” Richie sighed. “Eds—”

“Look.” Ryan jogged back into the living room and came back with the map. “If you are leaving—which I still don’t recommend—you should go look for supplies in Lowman.”

“Lowman?” Eddie asked.

“The town down there. Well, town’s a strong word. There’s a general store and a laundromat. But it’ll have canned soup for the road, and probably some nightcrawlers, if you’re really desperate. But if you go over the mountain, you’ll find Stanley. You’ll have more options up there. Again, that’s relative, because last time I was there, the population was hovering around 60. But there’s a little pharmacy, and a clinic. Idaho City is a little bigger—about 500 people—but it’s far. 90 minutes.” 

Eddie sighed. 

“Fine. We’ll go to Stanley in the morning, and then we’ll leave.” 

Joy nodded. 

“Okay. Best of luck. You should take the back room, get some privacy, since you paid for the privilege. Sorry for how it turned out. When you leave your review, just remember: I can’t control the presence of zombies, so it’s unfair to hold me, as a landlady, responsible for them.” 

Richie twitched a quick, pale smile.

“Duly noted.”


	9. Vapor Trails

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “We are the Leavers  
And the world turns beneath us  
We’re somewhere above you  
Vapour trails in the sky  
Days and nights scrambled  
Hurtling to somewhere  
From somewhere forgotten  
Somewhere forgotten  
We’re born out of recklessness  
The thirst for the thrill  
We’re revelry’s children  
Life’s too short for standing still…”   
\-- “The Leavers III: Vapor Trails in the Sky,” Marillion, Fuck Everyone and Run

“Are you sure about this?” Richie asked. They were standing on the ridge above the town of Stanley, Idaho. “This could be the ideal place for us. We’ll be safe.” 

“We can’t leave Marian out there by herself. Not without at least trying to warn her. Remember how pissed off you were when Bill--” 

“It’s not the same,” Richie snapped. “Not at all.”

Even mentioning Bill’s attempt at desertion made Richie’s stomach churn. In a moment, he was back there, back in that cavern. “Richie, he’s dead.” Like it wasn’t Bill’s fault that they were there in the first place. His selfishness. His obsession. That now that he’d gotten what he wanted, his revenge, he’d been done. Time to check out. Like it didn’t matter that Eddie, Eddie who wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for Bill, was hurt, was dying. It had been almost a year before Richie could bring himself to speak to a single one of them, and there was still a breach that would never be mended. They would be speaking about the good old days, joking around, and then Richie would remember Bev and Ben flirting in the hospital, while the doctors were removing Eddie’s right lung, performing a triple bypass, repairing his arteries, and restarting his heart, and a door would slam shut inside his mind. 

Marian, however, came long after that. She knew little about the murders, and nothing about the final showdown. She had served Eddie in the courtroom honorably, and she had stayed put afterwards. She had been the maid of honor at their wedding, a just recompense for winning Eddie his freedom. Of course he was loyal to her, and there was nothing Richie could do to dissuade him. And where Eddie went, Richie would go with him. 

Of course Richie wanted to warn Marian. But he was paralyzed by his fear of losing Eddie. Eddie had almost died, but he didn’t understand. He barely remembered being stabbed, but Richie saw it, once a week, at least. In his sleep. He remembered waking up and seeing Eddie straddling him, smiling, proud, the feeling of waking up to Eddie’s lips on his, the taste of camphor and menthol on his tongue, and then the life just running out of him, like piss down his leg...he would die if he ever had to feel that kind of fear again. That extremity of terror was just incompatible with human life.

“Mountain Village Mercantile,” Eddie said. “Down there.” 

“Do you see anyone?” 

Eddie shook his head. They weren’t exactly well-prepared for a pack of raiders. Eddie had a hunting knife tucked into his belt, and Richie carried a baseball bat. Why mess with success, right? 

Jesus. Richie was too old for this. He had a bad back, and though he wasn’t too fat yet, he’d definitely hit the point where he wouldn’t be thin again. His eyes were worse than they’d ever been. His left knee hurt when it rained. Eddie, of course, was still spry as ever. He spent hours jogging every week, did yoga, pushups, jumped rope, and kickboxed, all of which kept his thighs, abs and butt toned, tight, and pert. Richie ran a hand down his back, pausing to cup his ass. Eddie blushed and leaned closer. 

“Rich. Now?”

“Can’t help it, darlin’. You’ve got the most beautiful ass--” 

“Oh, please.” 

“You want me to prove it?” Richie asked. It was their stock repartee. Richie would flood Eddie with uxorious regard, all utterly sincere, Eddie would dismiss it hesitantly, and Richie would reassure him. He never tired of the glow that suffused Eddie’s face when he would compliment him. 

“Seriously?” Joy asked. “Right now?” 

It had taken her almost thirty minutes to describe the location of the general store to Richie, and in the end, she decided their chances were better with a guide. 

Eddie sighed and rested his head on Richie’s shoulder. 

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Eddie ran down the mountain, fleet of foot, leaping from rock to rock, grassy tussock to grassy tussock. Richie followed him, just trying not to twist an ankle. Idaho was an odd place, blanketed with grayish-green sagebrush that gave the landscape a low-resolution, Xbox-360 appearance. They were right where the foothills of Boise gave way to the Sawtooth mountains, which loomed in the near distance like giants sleeping under green velvet blankets. The dusty ground sparkled with motes of mica. Giant ponderosa pines provided shade and showered the ground with browning needles. Eddie, with his olive skin and brown hair, blended in perfectly with the brown landscape. Joy followed behind Richie, painstakingly inching down the slope sideways. 

Downtown Stanley was empty. There weren’t raider gangs roving the streets, which was encouraging, but people weren’t exactly going about their business, either. The door to the store was open. Eddie pushed it open. A bell jingled, but the sound was drowned out by the cocking of a shotgun. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Joy yelled. “Mike, hold on! It’s Pat’s granddaughter!” 

The shopkeeper, a solid guy in his seventies, scowled. 

“Pat?” 

“You know, Ted’s brother! I’m a Gibson! My dad’s Tim--”

“Your dad is the kid who threw up in the laundromat in Lowman?”

“Yeah, he did. So how about you put that down?” 

“Did the vomit kid send those two, too?”

“Okay, well, he’s not the vomit kid anymore, he’s forty-eight, and a tenured professor, and--look, it doesn’t matter. They’re friends.”

“Lady on the radio says the goddamn world’s ending,” Mike said. 

“Yeah. Well. Never know when you might need some cash. So how about you let us do some shopping?”

“Cash? You wanna take my goods for CASH? Now? In this economy?” 

Eddie flicked his eyes at Richie, who was beginning to feel a little stupid. They’d stopped by the ATM on their way out of Seattle, but if this really was the apocalypse, they wouldn’t get much mileage out of paper money, unless they found someone really committed to little portraits of Andrew Jackson. 

“How about my lake?” Joy asked. 

Mike grunted.

“That mud puddle?”

“Come on. Rainbow trout, all day long, just over the hill. You wanna live on canned chili forever, Mike?” 

Mike scowled. “Come on,” Joy cajoled. “Don’t make me beg.” 

“Fine,” he snapped. “Hundred bucks of store credit. Collectively.”

“Two hundred.”

“One twenty five. Don’t push me.” 

“Whatever,” Joy said. “You guys get seventy-five. I’ll take the other fifty. Get some food. Ammo. You can have the crossbow in the cabinet. Nobody knows how to use it.” 

“Joy.” 

“Hmm?”

“Why are you doing this?”

She sighed. 

“I guess it’s selfish, when you get down to it. Me, I’m not cut out for this. I’ll have to stay here. My parents...I’ll be locked up in the cabin with Terri and her stupid, shitty kids until I die. But maybe you can get out there. See the sights. Actually live the post-apocalypse, Fallout-style. And I could live it vicariously, through you. Does that make sense?” 

Eddie nodded. 

“Okay. All right. All right.” He grabbed a bag and started stuffing it with cans of New England clam chowder and crossbow bolts. “Did you really report on my divorce?” 

“Yeah,” Joy sighed. “Feels like a million years ago. I was rooting for you. Hell, we all were. Amazing story, too. You had a beautiful love story.” 

“Had?” Richie asked, indignant. 

“Had, have, will have. I mean, hell, ain’t nothing more romantic than a zombie apocalypse, right? I mean, this world isn’t all sock hops and malt shoppes.” 

“Was it ever?” Eddie asked. 

***  
“Are you sure about this?” Joy asked. She had just finished loading their supplies, including all seven of Richie’s cans of Chili-Mac, into the trunk of Eddie’s Hyundai Genesis. “I mean, I’m not trying to change your mind. But are you sure?” 

Eddie nodded, resolute. 

“She’s our friend. And she’s in trouble because of me.” 

“Us,” Richie corrected. 

“We’re ready,” Eddie said. “Best of luck, Joy.” 

“Likewise. Careful on the road down.” 

Richie slid into the driver’s seat, released the parking brake, and chunked the car into gear. Eddie looked up at him, and nodded. 

“We’re doing the right thing, Rich.” 

“I know,” he sighed. And the last time we did the right thing, you almost died, he thought, but didn’t say. Eddie kissed his cheek, smoothed back his hair, and settled in for a long car ride.


	10. Ocean Cloud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I've seen too much of life  
So the sea is my wife  
And the sweet Ocean Cloud is a mistress I'm allowed  
I've seen too much of life  
So the sea is my wife  
And the sweet ocean clouds will look down on my bones tonight..."  
-Marillion, "Ocean Cloud," from Out of the Box

“Rose, I want people on Constitution Ave. I’ve seen some Secret Service agents in the area, I want to make sure they aren’t moving onto our turf. That fat orange fuck isn’t getting one scrap of our stockpile. Edmund, I want you heading up sweeps along the Green Line looking for refugees. Diamanta.” Roxanne Anna Elizabeth Little turned to look at her third lieutenant, Diamanta Brock. “Have you heard from Marian?”

“Not since...no.”

Diamanta was a tall, curvaceous woman with a flood of silver hair. Despite her hair color, she was only nineteen years old. She had been Roxanne’s son’s girlfriend in middle school, right up until he’d come out. They had stayed friends. Rose and Edmund were her siblings. The three Brock children had been at her rowhouse in Dupont Circle when she’d gotten the call. They had, so to speak, gotten in on the ground floor. 

Roxanne Little had been waiting for this for a while. She’d thought it would be a civil war, not a zombie apocalypse, but nonetheless, her weapons, food, and medicine caches would come in handy. So would her FBI agent wife, her medical degree, and her antifascist colleagues. It wasn’t enough to restart civilization, but, as Billy Bragg sang, she wasn’t looking for England. She was just looking for a girl. Her daughter, actually. Montreal was eleven hours away. She should be here by now.

Her firstborn was just like her. Too much like her. It was a move she would’ve pulled, risking her life for those files. For the principle of it, no less. No goddamn courts, no goddamn judges. But Marian just couldn’t let that case go. She’d won: gotten all the money, gotten him his freedom, but Marian, just like her mother, couldn’t let a criminal go unpunished. According to Marian, this woman was a monster. “A clear and present danger,” she had said, and Roxanne had been inclined to agree. Munchausen by proxy patients didn’t stop until somebody made them. Roxanne had planned to help, too. But then everything had happened, and, well, the ex-Mrs. Kaspbrak was probably dead by now. Roxanne didn’t see much of a chance that someone like her would find out a way to survive this.

“Ma’am. Edmund mentioned you might want to see me.” 

Roxanne turned to see Ruby Raeka, chapter leader of the D.C. Antifascists, standing behind her. Ruby had been right behind her when she had made a play for the Library of Congress. She didn’t trust the government to set up camps for one split second, and her Antifa contacts had agreed. Roxanne wanted to shelter her friends, sure, but she needed more people. Runners, couriers, staffers...she hadn’t set up to create a socialist commune, but she needed people, and she wasn’t about to go to the goddamn military. Martial law was not part of her vision for the end of the world. 

“Ruby, you can just call me Rosie. Everyone does.”

Ruby shrugged stiffly. She’d done good work, but she hadn’t been ready for anything like this. At the end of the day, Roxanne supposed, no one had. Sure, she’d been preparing for the worst her whole life, but zombies? She hadn’t seen that one coming. She was the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and she’d been raised on stories about how quickly things could go south. How fast your neighbors could turn on you. Well, she’d seen it. The past three years had been something waiting to happen. What could she do? What could she say? She had feared, for a long time, that the colors of the flag would become blood red again. At least she knew the Antifascists had the same concerns she did. “Ruby, I need you to do a food run. Head to Ollie’s Trolley. Edmund went and got the family yesterday, and they want to help out in the cafeteria.”

Ruby nodded. 

“I’ll take Hartman and Callum.” 

“Good.” 

“Ma’am...still no word from Marian?”

Roxanne shook her head. 

“I’m sure she’ll turn up.” Ruby paused. “Ma’am.” 

It was so odd, Roxanne thought, to have a part of herself, her daughter, who she’d given birth to, raised, to be out there, somewhere, beyond her reach. That she could be in danger, and there was nothing she could do. When her daughter had been a baby, she remembered holding her as she dozed, singing: 

“No one can take you away from me now, don’t worry if they take me away…No one can take you away from me now, don’t matter how long we have to wait...” 

All she could do was wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm SO SORRY for the wait! It's been finals season, but tomorrow is the last exam, so I should be much quicker going forwards. Thanks for sticking around!  
P.S: Ollie's Trolley is a FANTASTIC burger joint on the National Mall, near Pennsylvania Ave, at the corner of 12th and E streets NW in Washington, D.C that happens to share a name with my dog.


	11. Montreal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I saw ice upon the river as the plane came in to land   
I heard Joni Mitchell singin' her poems of isolation   
The snow had hung around on the corners of the vacant lots   
And France was singing in the air of hi-rise North America..."  
-Marillion, "Montreal," from Sounds That Can't Be Made

Marian stood on the fire escape of 124 Rue Bleury and looked down at the city. Outside the apartment, the streets were coming alive. Shadows emerged from townhouses and apartments, moving into the streets. Her mother had been right. The infected had been lying low all day, while the Plague cooked inside them, getting ready to make its grand appearance. Could the Walkers climb stairs? She didn’t know. So far, most of them seemed to stay on the street. If she was going to make a break for it, she should probably do it now. There were only going to be more of them. But first, she wouldn’t last for long without insulin. She had to stop by a pharmacy before leaving the city. She put the papers in her backpack, along with a pipe wrench , and as many .44 caliber rounds as she could find. Her mother always hid them in the strangest places. Despite her limited supply, she felt pretty good about her chances. The IGA was only three blocks away, and it was inside. She’d been a track star in high school and college. Things were looking good. 

Some of them still looked human, she realized. They would just stand there, hunched over, shaking, laughing, or just emitting these awful, gasping breaths. The ones that were farther gone were rigid, walking more like Frankensteins than traditional shambling movie zombies. Their skins were blighted and pale, covered with something like lichen. Frightening as they looked, the newly turned mostly ignored her. Some took a few shuddering steps before stumbling, but most stayed locked in place, following her with wide eyes. The more decayed they were, the faster they moved. The paler they were, the more prominent the growths on their skin, the more gaunt and withered they were, the faster they moved and the more aggressively they pursued her. They would congregate under the fire escape, staring up at her with sunken yellow eyes, reaching up with atrophied, shaking arms. 

Marian jumped up onto the railing and leaped onto the next fire escape, which shuddered under her weight. She wasn’t exactly a parkour superstar, but she’d been a track star in high school and college, and her parents had socked her into self-defense classes when she was six, just in case any of the psychos they tracked down followed them home. Kickboxing, muay thai, wing chun, krav maga, aikido, jiu jitsu...between her mothers, they had had half a dozen martial arts mastered. Marian had done some wing chun in high school and college, but it had been five years since she’d trained with any seriousness. Of course, getting tracked down by the ex of one of her clients had always been a concern, but her office had a security guard, and she’d never felt like she was in danger. Of course, it wasn’t like karate would be much of a help against these things. 

She was getting the hang of it now, leapfrogging from fire escape to fire escape, staying above the fray. At the intersection of Rue de Bleury and Rue Saint-Catherine, the line of apartment complexes ended abruptly, and the street opened up into a wide boulevard lined with office buildings. Marian hopped over to the ladder and got ready to run. She kicked the nearest walker in the stomach, pushing it back, and bolted. It was easy enough to avoid the packs of rotters. 

Until she fell.

Three and a half inch heels and Quebecois streets full of potholes aren’t a good combination. Marian hit the pavement with her forearms, somersaulted, and landed flat on her back. She emitted a sound like an angry cat. She pushed herself up, but the moment she tried to put weight on her left ankle, it gave out. 

“Shit!’ 

One knot of walkers, attracted by the noise, started to shamble towards her. She got up again, and started to limp towards the Desjardins shopping complex. She made it inside with the walkers nipping at her heels, but she managed to close the doors and fasten them shut with her belt. Breathing hard, Marian took a look at her ankle. It was definitely swollen, but it didn’t seem like it was broken. Probably just sprained. She hobbled over to the directory, and spotted some medical offices on the fourth floor, including a sports physio office. They should have crutches, a cane, something. So she would have to find keys now, and a car, and do it all on one leg, while more and more walkers were filling the streets. She punched the tile floor. 

“Great! This is just perfect!” 

Well, no use sitting around feeling sorry for herself. Best to get moving before it stiffens up. Marian limped to the elevator, slammed the button, and crawled inside. It was easy enough to hobble to the medical offices while leaning on the railing. The doors to the offices were locked, but Marian picked the lock easily enough and slid inside. The waiting room was deserted. It wasn’t like she had been expecting it to be full of patients waiting to be seen, but it was still spooky. It was easy enough to lever open the drawers in one of the exam rooms and find elastic bandages, which gave her a little more stability as she busted into the physio office. She’d wanted a boot, but she couldn’t find one, so she had to settle for a pair of crutches. 

She moved back into the medical office, looking for the medication stash. Places like this usually kept a stash of insulin in their offices, just in case someone ran out--and charged a hefty price for it, of course. This one, however, was on the house. Just as she slid her hairpin into the lock of the safe, she heard the elevator ding. 

Hell! Walkers can’t use elevators, can they? 

Marian knelt down behind the counter and kept quiet. The revolver was tucked into the back of her skirt, but she didn’t want to risk drawing it, just in case her visitor was friendly. Hell, she was a lawyer, an officer of the court. She slaughtered people in the courtroom, not in deserted Quebecois malls. 

Someone spoke from the doorway. 

“You checked the other floors, right?” 

“Yeah, I checked. Nothing. She could be in New Brunswick by now.” 

“She was at the border less than twenty-four hours ago. This is one of the only places in the city that hasn’t been picked clean.” 

“Hmm.”

Marian, careful not to make any noise, cracked open the revolver and slowly pushed a round into the chamber, then went searching for another. 

“You ever wonder what this Kabbrak woman’s gonna do with her? I mean, I don’t want to...I used to work at a restaurant supply company, for chrissakes.” 

The voices got a little closer. Marian was only two rounds away from having a full clip. She couldn’t be sure they were looking for her, but “Kabbrak” sounded an awful lot like Kaspbrak, and she didn’t want to take a chance where Myra Kaspbrak was concerned. 

“For all we know, she’s her niece or some shit. All I know is that they said she had a lifetime supply of whatever you want. I’m talking morphine, Oxy, bennies, uppers…” 

“Oxy? My girlfriend’s got a heart condition! Like hell I’ll let a junkie get that reward out from under me!” 

“All I heard was whatever we want. Half of all you can eat is still all you can eat, right?”

“I guess. All I can say is that you’d better not screw me over.” 

“Whatever. You check in the back, I’ll--what the hell!” 

The second voice’s owner had bent over the counter and ended up looking down the barrel of Marian’s revolver. She stood up, pushing him back at gunpoint. “Oh, shit, Larry--she’s here!” 

Marian figured that she would be fucked if Larry had a gun, but he didn’t--just a tire iron. Luckily for her, he seemed much too scared to approach her while she had the gun trained on his buddy. 

“Who are you, and what the fuck do you want with me?” 

With a shaking hand, Larry pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of the pocket of his cargo shorts. She was too far away to read the fine print, but she could see a pencil drawing of her face, and the word WANTED emblazoned across the top. 

“L-look, we don’t want any trouble, okay? We just--my girlfriend needs her medication, and we thought--we weren’t going to hurt you, it says ‘Bring to New York, alive and unharmed.’ We--we didn’t think--” 

For a moment, Marian really considered killing them. It was terrifying, the idea that there were people out there trying to bring her to Myra. That Myra was looking for her. But they just seemed desperate. Not dangerous.

“Hey,” she said. Then she lowered her weapon and shot the lock off the safe. Larry shrieked, and not-Larry jumped, like he’d been electrocuted. She pried it open, poked around, and then stood up, holding a blisterpack of pills. “You need beta blockers, or ACE inhibitors?”

“Uh, the second thing.”

Marian bent back down, did a little more digging, and emerged with a yellow carton of Catopen. She hucked it at Larry. It doinked off his glasses and landed on the floor. He bent down and picked it up. 

“Th-thanks, but this won’t--”

“It’ll buy you time. And you did try to kidnap me.” Larry swallowed hard. “Now get out before I change my mind about shooting you.” 

On their way out, Not-Larry turned back. Marian saw something ill-favored glint in his eye as he peered at her over his shoulder, something hungry. 

“She knows you’re here,” he said softly. “They’ll follow you. Just like we did. Everyone wants that bounty, Counselor.”

They were gone before she could come up with a decent comeback. She scowled, bending back down, and pulled out a few little round-bellied bottles of insulin. They clinked together like little windchimes. As she filled up the syringe, she reflected on her predicament. She couldn’t keep moving, that much was clear. Not to D.C, at least. Her mothers, her brother...she couldn’t risk bringing Myra home with her. She was tempted to take it on the run, head southwest, maybe, but if she evaded them, they might head after her family, or maybe even worse, Eddie. No. She had to stay. She’d put out a radio warning, tell everyone to stay away, and hunker down. Everyone was running for their lives, anyhow. What were the odds that a significant number of people would come after her? There was no assurance that Myra would be true to her word. No. 

This was where she would make her stand. 

Such as it was. 

She sighed, depressed the syringe, and watched the sun go down over Montreal.


	12. Afraid of Sunlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Drive the road to your surrender  
Time comes around... out of my hands  
Small boats on the beach at the dead of night  
Come and go before first light 
> 
> Leave me running in the wheel  
King of the world  
How do you feel?  
What is there to feel? 
> 
> How do we now come to be  
Afraid of sunlight?  
Tell me girl why you and me  
We’re scared of sunlight?"  
-Marillion, "Afraid of Sunlight."
> 
> CW: Sex.

Richie woke up to the sound of Eddie singing softly. They’d been taking twelve hour shifts driving, and Richie had started them off. They had traded off around Idaho Falls, and Richie had fallen asleep the minute Eddie had chunked the Hyundai into cruising speed and parked it in the left hand lane. He always drove with his left hand on the wheel, right hand resting between his thighs, sometimes whistling a tune. 

“From the first hello you gave to me, I’ve done nothing else but smile,” Eddie sang to himself, keeping his voice low. Richie kept his eyes closed. He wanted to listen.  
“And I know you’re in a hurry,  
But it’s gonna take a while,  
So forgive me if we go slow,  
But there's something I think you should know…  
I'm goin fast as I can, please don't make me rush,  
This feeling's coming on way too fast.  
I'll tell you all of the things that you'll never forget  
But I'm not ready say, "I love you" yet,  
I'm not ready to say "I love you" yet.

Don't push me in too deep,  
I've always been the fool who rushes in.  
I know, You've got to take the pieces one-by-one  
For you've got everything.  
So forgive me if we take time.  
But there's something that's been on my mind…” He stopped and glanced over at Richie, who was still pretending to sleep. “Hey. You’re awake.” 

“You caught me,” Richie answered, rolling over and smiling shamelessly. “Can you blame me? You have such a pretty voice, sugar.” 

Eddie scoffed. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

“Eds, where are we?” 

“We’re thirty minutes from Vail, Colorado.”

“Hon, you were supposed to wake me up! How long have you been driving?” 

“Eh,” Eddie said. “You needed some rest, and I don’t mind. We’ll stop for the night in Vail. Speaking of--whoa!” Eddie stood up on the brakes. “Richie, look!” He leaned out the door, pointing at the WELCOME TO VAIL sign. 

In the light of their high beams, Richie saw a message spray painted on the sign: 

SAFE ZONE

NO WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT

Despite the reassuring message, they decided to avoid the town proper, electing instead to break into a hotel on the outskirts of town. It was easy enough to swipe a room key from behind the desk. Everything seemed deserted. Bizarre as it seemed, neither of them was ready to sack out. It was odd, but...they had missed so much time together. Odd, as it seemed, they only seemed to get tired when apart, and they seemed to wake up when they were together. Only to a certain point, of course. Eventually, there would be a crash. The moment they entered the room, Eddie was on Richie like white on rice. Richie loved it when Eddie manhandled him. It reminded him of when they were kids, how Eddie would just shove him around, manhandling him, positioning him however he liked. Eddie, bossy and assertive, in spite of his mother’s best efforts. Eddie’s hands were on his hips, fists balled in the cheap fabric of his cheap button-down gave Richie two thoughts at once. The first was that Eddie still smelled like anise and leather, even after two days without his body wash. The second thought was that he really, really hoped that Eddie would top him tonight. Neither of them was 100% dominant or submissive, but there were times when both of them needed a little reassurance, a little direction, and Richie liked to think that Eddie was pretty tuned into his signals. He’d always been the first one to see through Richie’s bullshit to his real emotions, his fear, insecurity, anger, and desire. 

Eddie smacked his ass hard. Richie yelped, a thrill of desire shooting through him. 

“Get on the bed,” Eddie growled, voice low. He was playing a role, but only a little. Eddie was bossy outside the bedroom, too. Richie got down on his hands and knees on the bed. He didn’t even bother getting undressed. He knew that Eddie would just slide down his jeans and underwear and fuck him. 

He heard the clink of Eddie’s belt as it hit the ground, and heard the sound of the zipper of the duffle bag. If he looked over, he knew he would see Eddie slipping on his strap-on, tightening the black straps around his thighs and arranging the base of his dick so that its base was firmly tucked against his clit. He could see it clearly enough in his mind’s eye that he didn’t even have to turn around. Eddie walked up behind him, rubbed an appreciative hand across his ass, and dipped a hand into the front of his briefs. Richie bucked, trying to chase those teasing touches, but Eddie withdrew just as quickly. He pulled back, only to push a hand into Richie’s hair, yanking his head upwards. 

“Richie,” he cooed. “Looking for me to tell you what to do?”

“Yes, sir,” Richie gasped. 

“Poor Richie. I can hear you thinking. Let’s try to put a stop to that.”

Eddie’s hands slid into his briefs, palming his ass. “Beautiful,” he whispered, and pressed a kiss to Richie’s neck. “Since we were teenagers, your hair’s gotten a little gray. But your ass--and your cock--still feel nineteen.” 

Richie purred and ground back. 

“Prove it.”

Eddie tugged his hair again and pushed his pants and underwear down. “Hold on, Richie. I’m gonna give you fingers.” 

“No, no, no fingers. Just fuck me, please, Eddie, I need you…” 

“Richie,” Eddie said. Fondly. Firmly. Richie knew that he would never fuck him dry, but he would hurry up the process. 

Eddie slid one lubed-up finger inside of Richie and probed for a few moments, just long enough to spread some lube around. After a brief hiatus, Richie could feel the head of Eddie’s cock pressed against his hole. Richie turned around and kissed Eddie while pressing a hand to the small of his back, urging him on. 

The first push in burned, but Richie didn’t care. He needed it. The pull was an incontrovertible reminder of Eddie’s presence. Eddie held him close, one hand cupping Richie’s cock, the other hand pressed directly over his heart. Eddie’s face was pressed into the back of his neck, tickling him with his hard breaths. The burn subsided quickly, and Richie started to pant, jerking back, trying to fuck himself on Eddie’s cock, giving a little jerk at the end of each stroke to rub the strap-on against Eddie’s clit. 

“Oh, Richie,” Eddie said, his voice a little unsteady. “Fuck.” 

“Please,” Richie moaned. 

Eddie wrapped his hand around Richie’s cock and started to jerk him off. His motions were quick and practiced. His hands knew every inch of Richie, knew where to touch him to make him squirm, and knew exactly how to push him over the edge. 

After the climax, they laid together for a few moments, breathing hard. Richie was on his back, and Eddie was curled up next to him, lying on his side. He undid the strap-on, placing it on the nightstand. Eddie only rested for a few moments, as per usual. Eddie was all about aftercare. At the beginning of the relationship, Richie, uncomfortable with being catered to, had tried to interrupt the process, but it was no use. Richie didn’t want to be another Sonia or Myra, just a black hole of attention feeding on Eddie, but not even God herself could turn off Eddie’s nesting instincts. Eddie adored fussing over Richie, clucking over his eating habits and bullying him into a skincare routine, and Richie had learned to stop worrying and enjoy it. 

Eddie emerged from the bathroom with a tube of lotion, a bowl of warm water, and a washcloth. He bent down and removed Richie’s shoes and socks. He then pulled off Richie’s jeans and briefs, using the washcloth to clean him up. 

Richie smiled at Eddie, stroking his hair gently. “Hey.”

“Quiet,” Eddie commanded, but there was no venom in his voice. He knelt on the bed next to Richie and squeezed some lotion onto his hands, gently rubbing it onto Richie’s hand and wrist. 

“Hey, Eddie.” 

Eddie groaned. 

“What.”

“So. What you said about my ass…”

Eddie smiled as he massaged Richie’s other hand. 

“Don’t let it go to your head.” 

Richie caught Eddie’s hand and pressed it to his cheek. 

“Hey. C’mere.” 

Eddie rolled his eyes, but he kneed his way over and straddled Richie. Richie could feel his wetness pressed against his stomach. “I love you.”

Eddie looked down at Richie with a beneficent gaze, hands rubbing his shoulders. 

“I love you, too.”

“I’ll never let anything bad happen to you again,” Richie said. 

“Noted. Thank you, Richie.” 

“Hey. C’mon. I’m trying to be impressive, and, you know, alpha.” 

“Richie,” Eddie said fondly. “You are many things, but you are definitely not an alpha.” 

Richie pouted theatrically. “It’s because I’m gay, isn’t it? Gay people can be alphas too, you know.”

Eddie’s mouth scrunched up as he tried to maintain a straight face, but it was no use. A cascade of laughter burst out of him. “No,” he giggled. “It’s because you’re stupid.” 

Richie grabbed Eddie around the waist and flipped them, kissing Eddie on the neck, chest, and face. 

“Stupid, huh? Well, joke’s on you,” he whispered. “You married me.” 

Eddie put a hand to Richie’s cheek, eyes soft. 

“Yeah. I did.” 

“Get some sleep, Eds,” Richie sighed, rolling off of him and grabbing the covers. “Everything goes right, we’ll be in D.C day after tomorrow.” 

“Mmmm,” Eddie said softly. “Richie?”

“Yeah?”

“Take off your goddamn shirt.” 

“Noted.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I'm sorry that this isn't longer but I'm posting this after finishing Mass Effect 3 and crying for like two hours (yes, it's an old game, and yes, I'm a blob of misdirected emotions one tiny setback away from a freakout at any given time, or, as my mom says, "sensitive") and I just needed to take a shower. It takes a little time for my fanfic author self-delusional denial machine to warm up, so anyone who ever considers dating me should definitely see me in the three hours after a sad ending so that they know what they're getting into. Thank all of you so much for sticking by me, and thanks for reading. Your comments keep this twitchy, neurotic piece-of-shit author going. Honest.


	13. Lady of the Backstage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "A lifestyle with no simplicities   
But I'm not asking for your sympathy   
Talk, we never could talk, distanced by all that was between us   
A lord of the backstage, a creature of language   
I'm so far out and I'm too far in..."  
\- "Lords of the Backstage," by Marillion, from Misplaced Childhood

Marian paused while scaling the low stone wall surrounding McGill University. Her sprained ankle was cramping up again, and she didn’t want it to give out. The fall wouldn’t seriously hurt her, but it wouldn’t feel good, either. When she swung her leg up and over, she heard her skirt rip up the side. Growling, she pushed off and landed on Upper Campus. 

“All right,” she mumbled to herself. “The radio station is in McEarney Hall. Entrances here, here, here, and...here.”

First, she tried to pick the lock, but the doors wouldn’t open. Not without a keycard. She tried to pry them open, but they still didn’t budge. “Dammit,” she groaned. 

Fine. The hard way it is. 

She had to jump to get her hands on the first window sill. The soles of her shoes were a little slippery, but it was easy enough go hop from ledge to ledge. When she got to the third floor, she almost slipped when she bent to lever open the window, but she managed to cling on with the tips of her fingers until she could get a foothold again. 

“Phew,” she gasped. “Jeez Louise. Okay. I can do this.” 

It was impossible to get a grip on the window from inside, so she just smashed it and released it from the inside. She slid in, self-inflicting a gash on her upper arm, and scanned the room. 

She was in a long hallway, furnished with elderly, navy-blue carpet, lined with doors. For just a second, she felt like she was in the courthouse again, striding those marble and hardwood halls like a hero of Sparta. 

***

She had met Eddie in Seattle, but her first clash with Myra had been in New York. She had rented office space in Newark, prepped for weeks and weeks, and when the time had finally come to parley, she had rented out a hotel conference room in Brooklyn. She’d known going in that Myra’s lawyer, Gerald Perez (a New York divorce and custody lawyer famous for representing the exes or ex in-laws of gay people in custody battles, a reputation that earned him nothing but contempt in Marian’s eyes), was going to be bringing Sonia in to rattle Eddie. So Marian brought Richie to rattle her. Two could play at that game, as far as she was concerned. Moreover, no jury would be impressed by a mother who would turn on her own child. 

Sonia wouldn’t make a good impression on the jury. She was too self-satisfied, too hysterical, and too overbearing. The jurors would immediately sense the oppressive the iron heel of her influence, and seize any chance to liberate quiet, yielding, diffident Eddie from her grasp. Roxanne was sure of it, and Marian had always profited from her advice. She hadn’t really needed it until now, though. Most abuse patterns weren’t particularly difficult to understand. There were established protocols to follow, and research to consult. This, however, was different. This situation was weird. So she brought her mom in. Shop had been most of what they had talked for most of Marian’s working life, and these psychological dynamics were definitely above Marian’s pay grade. She was a combination between a technician and a salesman, as were all lawyers, but she was not equipped to taxonomize the evil of the Kaspbrak women. That was more in her mother’s wheelhouse.

Roxanne Little was a psychiatrist. She had started out her career treating violent offenders in maximum security prisons and state mental health facilities, but had quickly transferred into risk assessment, and then to the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI. She had never told Marian what had made her decide to switch from treating criminals to hunting them, but Marian suspected that this disillusionment, this fall from optimism to cynicism, had colored her worldview. She had no aptitude for politics, and instead of charm, she turned people into apostles by the sheer force of her intellect and character. Her best qualities; her genius, her tenacity, and her integrity, turned everyone she met into either a follower of an enemy. To Marian, however, she had just been a mother: a little cold, a little distant, a little strict, but still the mother that had sung to her and comforted her through the bee stings of her youth. No hero, no queen bitch, just her mother. When you have a forensic psychiatrist in the family, though, why not use her? 

It had been Roxanne’s idea to poke the fissures between Myra and Sonia with a stick. They wanted the same thing: Eddie, back under their collective thumb. There were, however, some crucial differences. Sonia Kaspbrak had reacted hysterically when Eddie deviated even slightly from traditional feminine presentation. Myra, however, had married Edward Kaspbrak, and was perfectly content to overlook his transness so long as he was providing her with a meal ticket. When you really get down to it, Marian supposed, it was no surprise. The relationship’s nature wasn’t romantic. They didn’t sleep together. Myra had never even seen Eddie undress. The currency she extracted from him was financial and emotional, not sexual, and his gender was no impediment to endless stream of appeasement she was able to extort from him with her hysterics, crocodile tears, and emotional blackmail. 

Regardless, showing up with Richie in tow was bound to ruffle some feathers, albeit for different reasons. There were legitimate legal reasons to to it, Marian had told herself. Throw Myra and Sonia off their games. And that was true. Probably. But she also wanted to see their faces. They hadn’t disappointed, either. Sonia had practically shit her pants. 

“You,” she sneered. 

Richie, arms thrown around Eddie’s waist like he was in an L.L. Bean catalogue photoshoot, beamed. 

“Me.” 

Myra’s response had been less measured. She burst into tears, letting out wild noises that sounded more like forced shrieks than authentic sobs. When she looked up to gauge her audience’s reaction, her dark, beady eyes glittering under her grayish-blonde bangs like the eyes of a wild boar shining in the dark, Marian could discern no tears on her face. 

The resemblance was truly uncanny. If Marian hadn’t known otherwise, she would’ve sworn they were the same woman in different wigs. And if Marian saw it, so would the jury. 

She was feeling good about this one. 

Behind them, in the corner, Roxanne Little tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. She pulled out her phone and texted her daughter: 

She’s lying. Call her on it. 

Marian glanced down and smiled. 

“You know, Mrs. Kaspbrak, you don’t fool me. You’re not a victim. You’re not even a wife. You’re just a parasite, and you’ve leeched your last drop of blood from this man.”

“Miss Little, you’re out of line!” Perez shoved his finger in her face. When she looked past him, however, she could see Myra stop crying in an instant. Behind her, Roxanne shifted. Marian could see the blue glimmer of her eyes through the fringe of her hair.

These sorts of meetings were generally dick-measuring contests. Marian, however, wasn’t interested in empty posturing. Perez was a scumbag, but he wasn’t an incompetent. If somebody was going to blow this case, it was going to be Sonia, or Myra. Or both. That would be nice. 

Eddie looked good. She couldn’t claim to be an expert at that time, but he looked very different from the pinched, hunched man in the wedding photographs she’d seen on Myra’s Facebook wall. His color was good--his tan had deepened, the dark shadows under his eyes had receded, and he had developed a near-permanent blush high on his cheekbones. His hair was longer and thicker, and, like his eyes, it had gone from dull and lifeless to bright and shining. Like a man recovering from a wasting disease, he had gained weight, put on muscle, and shaken off his stiffness and fatigue for an attitude of confident, lithe readiness. Usually Marian would be nervous about a meeting like this. She didn’t like giving abusers chances to get their hooks into her clients. But this...she felt good about this. This was going to be fan-tastic. 

She wasn’t deterred by Perez’s bluster. She just folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. 

“Hey,” Richie snapped. “Back off.” He hadn’t left Eddie’s side, but he did lean forwards a little bit. 

“Is that a threat?” Perez asked, eyes widened theatrically. 

Marian rolled her eyes. 

“Obviously not,” she scoffed. “It’s just a, uh, friendly warning that shrieking uncontrollably at a smaller female may not be the best courtroom strategy. But if that’s how you wanna play it, have at it.” 

“Ah, Miss Little,” Perez said, a smug smile crossing his livery lips. “Playing the woman card already, are we? How disappointing.”

Marian smiled and shrugged.

“I don’t consider myself a dishonorable opponent, but if there’s a card in my hand that’ll help my client, I’ll play it. I’m no rube, Mr. Perez. I may not be a New Yorker, but we have cities--and domestic abusers--out West, too. Let me be very, very clear: this is a courtesy call. You won’t get a dime out of Eddie. If you try to take it, I will rip you a new asshole and air every. Single. Piece. Of. Your. Dirty. Laundry.” She paused, turned, drew a cigarette from her pocket, and slipped it between her lips. “And if you couldn’t tell, THAT was a threat.” 

Perez was sputtering and harrumphing, but Marian looked past her to see Roxanne. A small smile was hovering around the corner of her mouth, and her eyes sparkled. She gave a subtle, approving nod. 

“Now, I’m hungry!” Marian said. She raised her hand, and grinned at Richie, Eddie, and her mom. “ Gentlemen, let’s do lunch.”

***

Marian growled and shook her head. It was pointless, bringing up old victories, especially now. It wasn’t like lawyer skills translated well post-apocalypse. Three days she had holed up in that mall, but it had gotten much too hot. It was a nice place, with a lot of food and medicine, plenty of places to lay low, but there were more and more mercs skulking around. She’d been able to keep out of sight, but sooner or later, they’d find her. It was better to keep on the move. She was fast and quiet, but she had no illusions about her ability to take on a grown man head on. But first, she had to make sure that Richie and Eddie didn’t follow her. 

The radio branch of the Montreal emergency notification system was housed in McGill University. If she could change the outgoing message, it would play on all radio stations around Montreal, down to Pont-Lac-Champlain. If Eddie and Richie came to Montreal looking for the briefcase, they would hear her message. Eddie was stubborn, and he might take the warning as more of a challenge, but Richie would keep him away. She felt sure of it. It wasn’t that Richie didn’t like her. They were good friends. But she knew where his priorities lay, and so did he. 

Marian picked the lock to the radio studio and flicked the lights on. The power was still on, at least. The console wasn’t too terribly difficult to figure out. She found the “record” button fairly quickly, located the microphone, and got ready. 

All right, she thought. Let’s hope this works. 

“Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation,” Marian said, muffling her voice with a hand. “We have assumed control. We have assumed control. We have assumed control.” She laughed briefly, shook her head, and got serious. “This is Marian Anna Little. Richie, Eddie, anyone else...if you hear this, head east. Stay away from Montreal. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She paused again. “That’s an order. Little out.” She pressed the stop button, ejected the CD, and pushed it into the drive of the Emergency Broadcast system. After a few moments, the radio crackled to life. 

“Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation…” the radio buzzed. 

Faintly satisfied, Marian turned to go. She’d done what she could. For the time being, that would have to be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note: I just wanted to take a second to recommend the album "Misplaced Childhood" by Marillion. It's available on Spotify, and it's an excellent Reddie soundtrack. Highlights are "Kayleigh," "Lavender," "Childhood's End," "White Feather," and "Blind Curve," but it's a concept album, so it really works best if you listen to it in one sitting. Much love to everyone who takes the time to drop a kudos or a comment.


	14. Forced in Servant Exile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I saw the starlings wheel round Georgian spires   
Gathering on patrol in the skies   
In the distance burns the flame of Grangemouth   
And the dream is lost   
Everything what it could inspire   
From the take you know there is no distance   
How we talk about in the secret affairs   
Taking our ride into the distance   
To be what it was or could have been   
What I should have said?
> 
> I see myself forced in servant exile   
Turning around at another's command   
All I want to see is identity   
What I could have been   
What I did   
Could have been..."  
-"Exile on Princes Street," Marillion, from Clutching at Straws

Richie stayed awake for as long as possible. The place seemed pretty safe, but you couldn’t be too careful. Seeing the love of your life nearly die in your arms could make you paranoid. Eddie, however, remembered little to none of that final confrontation. Since divorcing Myra, he had slept very well indeed. 

When Eddie slept, he slept hard. On his stomach, one leg hiked up, face in the pillows, or on his side, thumb curled next to his nose, or on his back, t-shirt riding up, and exposing a thin sliver of his toned stomach. Richie only felt safe when he was holding Eddie in his arms, feeling the warmth of his skin, the steady thump of his heart, and the rhythm of his breath. As Richie held him close, Eddie huffed softly, turning his head to bury his face in Richie’s chest. There were moments, like right now, that Richie thought it would sear through his skin and dissolve him to ashes. His disgust for Myra and Sonia was overwhelming. How the fuck could a human being harm the sweet body lying in his arms? Richie was gobsmacked that somehow the world had somehow overlooked the beauty and the worth of this gorgeous man. 

Eddie really had grown up beautiful. He’d been lovely when he was a boy, but he hadn’t been very comfortable in his own skin, always hunched over and fidgeting. It was only when they were alone that he’d truly come alive, wearing those little red shorts and tube socks, kneeling on the floor of Richie’s bedroom, glowing and nodding as he listened to Richie prattle on about nothing. That was how Richie had remembered him in dreams. When Richie had returned to Derry, twenty-seven years later, Eddie had been lovely, too, but he’d been tired. His eyes had been ringed with dark circles, he was pale, skinny, and fragile, and his hair was dull and brittle. He looked like he’d been bled dry. He’d moved easier, a bit, and it was obvious that the T had sharpened the angles of his jawline and build, and he stood up a bit straighter, maybe because he’d ditched the binders made of Ace bandages and duct tape Richie had helped mock up throughout their teenage years. He was still the same Eddie though, still earnest, and tightly wound, and always thinking of everyone else first. He still had the same gorgeous brown eyes. He was still a prickly, upright little pain in the ass. 

He was still unbearably lovely, and Richie was still horrifically, inconceivably, irrevocably in love with him. 

The moment he walked into that room, he had to resist the urge to run across the room, grab him, dip him, and press a kiss to those lips. Instead, he just smiled, and reached out to take Eddie’s hands. 

“Eds,” he whispered. 

Eddie’s face had crumpled, and he fell forwards, pulling Richie into a desperate hug. Later that night, after they had made love for the first time, Eddie had held Richie in his arms, spoke to him softly. 

“Richie,” he had whispered. “Oh, Rich. I remember everything. How could I have forgotten?” He turned around in Richie’s arms, flipping to face him. “Richie. You gave me my name.” 

Richie had kissed him then, hard and claiming, because how could he, of all people, take responsibility for Eddie Kaspbrak? I mean, hell, even here and now he wondered why Eddie had stuck with him. 

Three years later, Eddie slept in Richie’s arms in a Vail hotel just like he had that night, and just like that night, Richie stayed awake as long as possible. For those twenty-seven years, Richie would’ve killed to just be able to feel Eddie’s skin against his, and he preferred not to sleep through too much of it. But Eddie was warm and soft against his chest, and the breath Eddie was breathing on Richie’s throat was soft and sweet, and soon enough, Richie drifted off to sleep. 

***

When Richie woke up, Eddie was still asleep. He had kicked the covers off, and Richie looked over to see the tanned, glowing curve of his back and the plush, sensitive rise of his ass against the white of the sheets. Richie reached over and placed a hand on the small of Eddie’s back, reveling in the silky softness of his skin. Eddie moaned sleepily and shifted closer to him. 

“Morning, my love,” Richie said said, grinning, as he bent to press a good morning kiss to Eddie’s lips. Eddie kissed him back, wet and sloppy, slipping his tongue into Richie’s mouth, filthy and sexual. He pulled back, and Richie was so mesmerized by the swollen, wet pink of his mouth that he almost didn’t hear Eddie’s rejoinder. 

“Your breath reeks,” he groaned, wrinkling his nose, but it didn’t stop him from closing the distance once more to kiss Richie again, hands on his hips. 

“I aim to please. D’you want to hit the road, or—” 

“Richie, you saw the sign. We have to see if there are people here. If they know what’s going on—if they need help—” 

Richie swept a hand through the cowlicked peaks of Eddie’s hair, smoothing it back. 

“Eds.”

“Richie,” he replied softly. He sat up, gloriously naked, beautifully toned thighs and calves flashing in the sunlight trickling through the window. Richie felt something dark curl through his guts, something clotted and dark. He didn’t like it, always being the one zealously guarding them, trying to deny the world the benefits of Eddie’s selflessness, his bravery. But they didn’t know. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t been in the sewers. They hadn’t seen—

“I’m not selfish,” Richie said. 

Eddie swung a thigh over Richie’s legs and straddled him, kissing his cheeks, placing two fingers under his chin to tilt his face up. Eddie’s face was tanned and sprinkled with freckles. His eyes were as big and liquid as the muddy bosom of the Mississippi River. 

“Oh, Rich. I know. I know. I know.” 

***

1,750 miles away, in the District of Columbia, on the steps of the Library of Congress, Roxanne Little pulled her fist back and punched the President of the United States in the face. 

***  
“Hello?” Eddie yelled. He’d jogged a few pages ahead of Richie, the heels of his boots clacking on the paving stones. He was wearing the tailored leather jacket Richie had bought him for his birthday, along with with his soft brown hiking boots and jeans. “Hello? Is there anybody out there?” 

Richie saw a flicker of movement from behind the window of the diner on the corner. 

“Eds!” 

The door flew open with a chime, and a wan, pale woman flew out. 

“Oh, thank goodness—new people! Are you two all right? I’ve been waiting to see someone for so long—I was beginning to think that I was all alone!” She stood in front of Eddie, wringing her bony hands. “Please come in—I have coffee, I have water, please come in!” 

Richie followed Eddie through the door to the diner. 

“How long have you been here?” Eddie asked. “Where did everyone go?” 

“Ah,” the woman said. “Well, the evacuated the town. Took ’em to Denver, I think.”

“Why not you, Miss—”

“Oh, call me Abigail. I couldn’t leave. My daughter is away at Colorado State. I can’t have her not knowing where I am.” 

“Of course,” Eddie said. “Well, it seems safe enough here.”

“Yes, I suppose so, if a bit lonely.” Abigail poured out a cup of coffee and held it out to Eddie. Her hands were shaking. Richie shifted in his seat, suddenly jittery. “Do you have any children, Mr…” 

“Eddie. And uh, no. Not yet.” 

“Well, may the good lord provide you with them, Eddie. But you are married, aren’t you?” 

“Yes,” Eddie answered, a little more cautiously. “To—” 

“To him?” Abigail pointed at Richie. 

“Yeah. This is my husband, R—”

“Richie. Yes, I know.” 

Eddie put down the mug. 

“Ma’am, what’s going on? Why are you asking me these questions? How do you know Richie?” 

“Everyone knows about Richie nowadays,” Abigail said darkly. “People are hunting him coast to coast. There’s a mighty big incentive, Mr. Kaspbrak. But me? I’m not doing it for the reward. I saw the videos, Mr. Kaspbrak. The dirty things you did. To your body. With him.” She stabbed her finger at Richie again. “She showed me.” 

“We’re leaving,” Richie said. He grabbed Eddie’s shoulder, pulling him out of his seat and taking a step backwards. “Don’t make me hurt you, lady. I don’t know what Myra told you, but—” 

“Do you know what this plague is, Mr. Tozier? This is God’s judgement. You can escape me, you can even strike me down, but you can’t escape His wrath. Your sin of lust has caught up with you. So have His servants.” 

“She called someone,” Eddie said. “We should leave.” 

She didn’t chase them. They made it back to the car easily enough. The streets were empty, but Richie’s nerves were tingle-tangling so intensely that he felt like he was going to jump out of his skin. The moment they were in Eddie’s Hyundai, Richie gunned it and peeled out of the parking lot. 

“Take a look,” Richie said tersely. “Is there anyone behind us?” 

“No, we’re—oh, wait. Shit. Yeah, someone’s there. Step on it, Rich.”

“Is it her?” 

“No. No, it looks like a—shit! He’s got a fuckin’ gun! Richie, keep your head down!” 

It wasn’t exactly comfortable, driving like a turtle, eyes on par with the horn, but at least he wasn’t getting his brains blown out. “Rich, hold on. I’ve got an idea. Hold it steady.”

“Eddie, what?! Are you crazy! Stay down!” 

“No, no. They want me alive. Relax. No sudden turns, okay?” 

In the rearview mirror, Richie could see Eddie roll down his window and scooted out to sit on the sill. His upper body was completely outside of the car. Richie couldn’t see what Eddie was holding in his hand, but whatever it was, he hucked it as hard as he could at the windshield of the oncoming car. “Eat shit, asshole!” 

Well, the thing that was in Eddie’s hand must have been a bottle of vodka with a flaming rag stuffed in it, because the windshield shattered and the upholstery of the seats burst into flame. The car behind them screeched to a halt. “Richie, punch it!” 

Forty minutes later, Richie slowed the car to a halt in a copse of trees, gasping for breath. Eddie, equally breathless, languished in the backseat. Richie pushed his seat back and shot a glance at Eddie. 

“Videos, huh?” he asked. 

Eddie waved a hand and waved a middle finger at his beloved husband. 

***

When they had first started living together, their sleep schedules were one of the first things they had to work out. Richie wasn’t much of an early riser, and Eddie tended to hit the gym at five in the morning, and come back at seven-ish, nursing a cup of coffee. He would wake up every morning at seven thirty and walk down the stairs to see Eddie sitting at the dining room table, wearing those red booty shorts, all sweaty, with his hair stuck up at odd angles, glowing and beautiful. The first time he’d seen Eddie like that, he hadn’t been able to help himself. He rushed over and planted a kiss on his mouth, grabbing him around the waist and pulling him up out of his chair. Eddie squeaked in surprise, then purred softly, wrapping his legs around Richie’s waist. When Richie straightened up, Eddie came with him, clinging to Richie’s torso. He smelled like sweat. It was glorious. Eddie pulled away with a gasp, tossing his head to the side. 

“Ohh—Richie—” he moaned. 

Richie kissed down his neck, and hummed in response. 

“Rich,” Eddie gasped. “Wh-what was that for? Mmh—” He tilted his head up to return another kiss. “Not that I’m complaining, but I’m all sweaty, a-and gross—” 

Richie grabbed Eddie under his butt and dipped him. Eddie whooped and wrapped his arms around Richie’s neck. 

“I can’t help it,” Richie said, looking down at Eddie, who was rumpled and starstruck. “You’re glowing, sugar. You’re so beautiful.” 

“Oh, Rich,” Eddie sighed. He threaded his fingers through Richie’s hair, pushing it back from his forehead. “Why’d you get so hung up on me, of all people?” 

Richie kissed him again, because how could he let that sort of talk slide? He didn’t think that he could just fuck away Eddie’s self-doubt, but he did get pretty nervous about some of those serious talks, always concerned that he’d say something stupid. It was why he was always mouthing off. It was easier to head heartfelt conversations off at the pass. It worked with all his other friends, his parents, and his sister, but not with Eddie. Eddie was patient enough to see through the disguise, and kind enough to tempt Richie into dropping it. On occasion. 

“Because you’re so damn hot, baby.” Eddie rolled his eyes, but Richie pressed on. “You were always there for me, and smart, and brave, and sweet…”

Eddie exhaled softly, and inched a few fingers into Richie’s waistband. 

“Are you trying to talk me into something, Rich?” 

“Like what?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie whispered, after pausing to suck a bruise onto Richie’s neck. “Maybe you could push my shorts to the side, and fuck me right here on the table.” He ducked his head a little further, and sank his teeth into Richie’s collarbone. “Maybe, um. You could, uh, take pictures. You know.” He blushed, and buried his face in Richie’s shirt. “Of me. Or a video…”

Richie grinned. 

“You want me to tape us?” 

“I’ve been...curious,” Eddie said shyly. He didn’t look up, but Richie could see his crimson cheeks through his bangs. 

Richie was a little confused by Eddie’s swing from confident to shy, but he wasn’t shocked. When they were getting frisky, sometimes Eddie would sound utterly liberated—until his brain caught up with him. Richie just had to gentle him through it. 

“I’d love that,” Richie breathed. “I just have one question.”

“What?”

“If we post this online, will you photoshop me out and replace me with Henry Cavill?” 

Eddie laughed. The sound was pure sunshine, and Richie had to chase it. Richie lifted him up, kissed him, and dipped him. 

“We’re not posting this, you pervert. Is your career really that dead?” 

“Eh, it’s pretty dead.” 

“Sex tape dead?” Eddie asked. 

“Hmm,” Richie purred. “Could go either way. Care to find out?”

***

Richie twisted around in his seat and grinned.

“Still worth it.” 

Eddie panted once, twice, and rolled his eyes. 

“Asshole.” He paused. “Yes. Maybe.” He caught Richie’s shit-eating grin, and scowled. “Only maybe, jackass. Only maybe. See how I feel tomorrow, how about that?”

“I’d rather ask you how you feel tonight.” 

Eddie opened his mouth to jab back, but the expression of hope on Richie’s face took the wind out of his sails. 

“Yeah? Well, why don’t you let your dick do the talking, blabbermouth?” 

Richie chuckled. 

“Oh, my sweet, darling spouse, you are on. Take me back to 70, my dear. If we hurry, we can be in Kansas City by nightfall.”


	15. You're Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm SO sorry this is so short, there's a lot of threads to tie together and school is crazy right now...please have mercy upon this piece of shit...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The quiet sadness of the people of the North  
Echoes silently around the cold grey places  
Ecstasies undared  
Tremble upon the edge of the tightly, respectably unfulfilled  
Who drink to excess in order to forget what never happened 
> 
> Brave faces  
Well dressed ordered minds on suicide's edge  
Reflected in the rain-skimmed slate grey, battleship grey, hardship grey...
> 
> And further South, and homeless  
Here I am  
Globally altered and dishevelled  
Oh darling, I've done it all  
An antithesis of sorts  
And yet bound together and hopelessly in love  
With the inevitable loss  
And the end  
How can we run from ourselves?"  
-"Born to Run," Marillion, from "Radiation"

Roxanne Little was icing her hand in the Reflecting Pool when her son came looking for her. He was wrapped up in a brown wool coat. The collar was flipped up around his neck, and his shoulders were hunched. 

“Ruby told me what you did,” he said. “What were you thinking? They could’ve killed you.”

Roxanne didn’t answer. The weather was chilly, but not cold. Booker was a soft touch when it came to the cold. Always had been. 

He sighed. “I know you’re scared. But this...you’re acting crazy, Ma. You’re worried about Marian. I’m worried, too. But this is not how to handle it.” He sat down next to her. “I know you hate it when I lecture you, but...we need you, Ma.” 

“What do you need me for, Booker? I...I am asking. To get society started again? All that we can do is just survive.”

“They say that you planned for this.” 

Roxanne shook her head. 

“Who could ever plan for something like this? You want me to put together a new system, a better system? I just want to know that my kids are safe. What am I supposed to do? Just stay here?”

“Are you going to trust her, or not? What if you get all the way out there and she’s gone? You know, like playing phone tag, only infinitely more dangerous. I need you here. She knows where we are. She knows how to reach us.” 

“If she’s able,” Roxanne snapped. She yanked her hand out of the Reflecting Pool and shook off the water. The skin was bright red and freezing cold. 

“Your hand,” he said. “It’s getting worse.”

“She went back for the files, Booker. That case. She couldn’t stop talking about it. Where’d she ever get the idea that the world was supposed to be fair?” 

“You mean the guy with the Munchie wife? That was three, four years ago. What made that one client special enough for her to risk her life for?” 

Roxanne sighed. 

“It was bizarre, is what it was. This guy goes back to his small-town Maine high school reunion after twenty-seven years, post-transition, and runs into his childhood best friend. A lot of catching up to do, right?” 

Booker shivered and blew into his hands. 

“I’ll say. Almost everything changes, and after thirty years?”

“Except it didn’t. Not really. So, this guy, back in 1992, was the only friend her client had. The only real one. He gave him his name. Now, after he left, back in ’92, mind you, he finds a wife, after a good few years of pining, who is willing to support him through his transition, but there’s a price. Good God, there’s a price.” 

“She’s a Munchie.”

“Yes, but that’s only part of it. She’s a parasite.”

“Mentally abusive?”

“Nothing but.”

“Physically?”

Roxanne made a hand-wavy motion. 

“That’s less clear. I wasn’t privy to all of their private discussions. I’d argue permanent liver damage and lung scarring is pretty damn physical, but what the hell. I don’t know that she hit him, although I’m fairly certain she did.” Roxanne sighed and rolled her shoulders. “So he’s away from her for the first time in damn near two decades, and there’s his oldest, best, first friend.” She shrugged. “What will happen happens. They went to Marian, asked for her help. She took everything the wife had and more. They stayed friends.” Roxanne turned, fumbling with her lighter, a clove cigarette clenched in her teeth. “Marian never got over it. It was savagery. Pure savagery, perpetrated on someone who was vulnerable, someone who couldn’t fight back. She held onto the idea that she could bring the wife to justice, make her answer for what she’d done. She was building a case.” She frowned, looking up at her son, eyes narrowed. “She couldn’t leave it behind. She couldn’t let go.” 

Booker scowled. 

“What kind of justice system is she counting on?”

“That’s what I told her,” Roxanne sighed. “But, then again, this kind of situation leads itself to a different kind of justice.”

He flicked his eyes at her sidelong.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. But they’ll start eating their own young soon enough.” 

“Well. We’ve all thought about it.” 

“Yes.” 

Roxanne exhaled, blowing a cloud of smoke up towards the sky, which was screamingly blue and clear. 

“The fences are working--for now,” Booker said. “We’ve kept ourselves clear down to the Mall, which is completely overrun, by the way. The Botanical Gardens and the Capitol building are all clear.”

“Empty?”

“Empty.”

“We’ve made a safe place, Booker. We’ll see who shows up.”


	16. Fury (Hell Hath No)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "You're thinking up your white lies  
You're putting on your bedroom eyes  
You say you're coming home but you won't say when  
But I can feel it coming  
If you leave tonight keep running  
And you need never look back again..."  
-"Take It On the Run," REO Speedwagon, from Hi Infidelity

NEW YORK CITY

Marian Little’s latest little broadcast had said that Myra Kaspbrak was gathering all the freaks to her, but that wasn’t quite how Hatsu Brashears saw it. Plenty of people in the city were looking for a way to make out, and if it was a little sketchy, well, everybody was trying to survive here. Morals were a rich man’s game, and everything Hatsu had worked for didn’t count for much anymore. When John had come to her apartment, she’d gotten the feeling that this was less a job offer than a thinly-veiled threat. She’d just been Perez’s paralegal during the divorce case, but Myra had been pretty pissed off with all of them—Hatsu included. She’d recognized John right away—hard to forget a guy that had threatened to kill his ex-brother-in-law’s lover in open court. She wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if she’d declined, but she was sure she didn’t want to find out. 

If it was stipulated that Myra’s employees weren’t all freaks, Hatsu was coming to realize that Myra herself certainly was one. She hadn’t been exactly sane during the trial, but she hadn’t been like this. Hatsu was standing behind the La-Z-Boy that Myra used as her throne, as far as it could go, eyes fixed on the television in front of them, watching Myra’s ex-husband have sex with a washed-up standup comedian. It was rough, no doubt about it. Awkward as hell. But it was better than being out there and getting chewed on by Walkers.

Right?

On the screen—sixty-five glorious inches, Hatsu thought ruefully—the former Mr. Myra Kaspbrak was sitting on his lover’s lap. Richie To-something was cupping the globes of Edward’s ass, kneading them softly. Hatsu absently wished that she had an ass like that. She worked out, did the squats, everything, but her cheeks stayed square. Firm, taut, sure—but she could never achieve the peachlike spheres that seemed to be the gold standard. Edward was kissing his neck softly, sucking gently bruises down the slope of his throat. Richie’s face was marred by stubble and frown lines, but he was perfectly content in that moment, eyes closed in bliss. 

“Do you see that, Hattie?” Myra asked. “His hands?”

“Uh-huh,” Hatsu said, desperately trying to remind herself of the carnage on the streets. 

“Hattie, have you ever had something stolen from you?”

“Uh, well, in elementary school, during sleepovers and stuff, but nothing, you know, big. Like a car, or, uh—” 

“A husband.”

“Yeah. No. Not that.”

On the television, Edward and Richie talked to each other, soft and sweet, lips almost touching. 

“Have I ever told you that you have an absolutely fantastic ass?” Richie asked. “Really. It’s tremendous. The best out there. I’d say the best money can buy, but come on. Money can’t buy this. This is all-natural, given by God, and I, for one, am so glad that I have an apartment there. So. Have I ever told you?” 

“Filthy,” Myra growled.

“Yeah,” Edward purred, petting Richie’s face. “Only every time you’ve got a hard-on and you’re looking for a place to put it.”

“Never talked that way with me,” Myra snapped. 

Small wonder, Hatsu thought. But, then again, a mid-forties ex-comedian with a bad back and worse eyesight wouldn’t exactly make her drop her panties either. But everything was relative. If you trapped Hatsu in a one-bedroom with Myra Kaspbrak for a decade, Richie Tozier would probably start to look pretty good. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” said ex-comedian purred back. “There are hundreds-no, thousands-of places I could put this hard-on. But I’m only interested in three of them.” He looked up, and did a little counting on his fingers. “Wait. Five. Two of them are the same.” 

It was only the very real fear for her physical safety that kept Hatsu from laughing. She’d watched his old routines for research purposes, and she hadn’t thought they were very funny, but this was kind of charming, in an eye-rolling, oh-you-dirty-wag sort of way. 

“Look,” Richie said softly. “When you sit on my lap like this, you can see how far up into you my dick goes. All the way up to your belly. Does that turn you on, sugar?”

“Oh, fuck,” Edward whispered. Almost involuntarily, he pressed down hard on his lover’s thigh and ground once, hard. 

“Yeah? Makes you fuckin’ hot, to think how small you are, that I can use you like a toy, your little ass squeezing hot and tight around my cock?” 

“That is a monster, Hattie,” Myra said, pointing one manicured finger at the TV. “My Eddie is delicate. Impressionable. He can’t take this kind of treatment. He needs to be with me. I understand his needs. I understand him. That disgusting faggot is manipulating my Eddie. Using him for—for SEX, Hattie, to fulfill his deviant desires. And that bitch helped him.”

Yeah. Those were the two in the crosshairs. The bitch and the faggot—not that Hatsu would ever use that sort of language on her own, no sir. Hell, she’d sympathized with Mr. Kaspbrak, even when she was still writing briefs for Perez. She’d thought it was a little sleazy to up and disappear to fuck your old flame while still married, but you could only repress those things for so long. But those feelings were irrelevant. Myra had what everyone wanted—meds. Food. She was calling the shots, and she had Magdalene Marian Little and Richard Tozier firmly in her crosshairs. Myra Kaspbrak, nee Lambert, daughter of pharmacy magnate Wilbert Lambert, was proffering her supply to anyone—desperate mercenary, highly-trained bounty hunter, criminal psycho—who was willing to bring them to her, alive and unspoiled. Richie was in the wind. Nobody had seen him since Vail. The bitch, however...she was another story. 

The messages came in every evening like clockwork. It was like she was trying to keep their attention. Live Skype calls. Taunts. Threats. Insults. Anyone else would’ve stopped taking them, but Myra was either a slow learner, or getting something from the messages that Hatsu wasn’t grasping. Those calls, more than anything else, convinced Hatsu that she was on the wrong side of this. Marian was so waggishly insouciant, with her ragged Joan-of-Arc bob and devil- may-care attitude, that in the story of this post-apocalypse, she clearly was Han Solo, and Myra was, well. Richie had said it, not Hatsu. What did that make Hatsu, then? The cackling finger puppet? The green slave girl? 

If she was lucky, she wouldn’t have to figure it out. Marian, Richie, and Edward would stay far away, and she would take advantage of the safe housing, free food, and potable water until Myra succumbed to a myocardial infarction, coronary, or sleeping pill overdose. Hatsu didn’t want to hurt anybody. She didn’t want to help anyone hurt anybody. She didn’t even want to get Myra and Edward back together. If she was him, she wouldn’t want to get back with Myra. She was crazier than a shithouse rat, and not in the fun, good-sex way. In the Annie Wilkes, Nurse Ratchet, Ralph-Fiennes-in-Red-Dragon way. She just wanted to survive. If it got bad enough, she could chance it with the zombies. For now, though, this was preferable.

Just. 

The laptop had arrived two days ago. The guy—Hatsu didn’t know his name, but he was the main one, the one who Myra had sent out to Seattle—had brought it back with him, and they had spent three days tearing it apart. She’d dug into their online banking (they were doing well, even for Seattleites), medical records (Delatestryl and pulmonology appointments for Edward, progressive lenses and hernia surgery for Richie), e-mails (work messages and near-constant IM chats, some sweet and innocent, some teasing, some out-and-out erotic, and some utterly… inventive), and photos. The photos pissed Myra off the most—at least, until she found the porn. Most of the pictures were vacation shots—the San Juan Islands, LA, Acadia, Montreal...but the most impressive album was titled “Honeymoon.” Paris, London, Amsterdam, Budapest, Krakow…all could’ve passed for travel agency advertisements. A kiss on the Bridge of Sighs. A soft embrace in Belsize Park. There were a few intimate shots, too—mostly images of rumpled linens, soft, saturated pictures of the new husbands dozing in each other’s arms. No sign of the photographer, except for a heeled boot reflected in the mirror of one hotel room. 

The boot belonged to Marian Little.

The porn had been tucked away in a password-protected folder. The password was written down in an address book the guy had swiped—MYRA-IS-A-CUNT. 

Her shriek when she’d seen the first video was enough to wake the dead. Hatsu guessed that no matter how long you’ve been divorced, you’re never ready to see your ex getting face-fucked by—well. It was easy to clown on Richie Tozier. He hadn’t been particularly funny when he was on TV, and he’d pretty much dropped off the face of the earth a few years ago, but you couldn’t deny that his tackle was...intimidating. I mean, Jesus. A few minutes in, Hatsu’s jaw had been aching in sympathy, but maybe the ex-Mr. Myra Kaspbrak was just made of sterner stuff. 

Anyhow.

Marian Little hadn’t left Montreal. Hatsu couldn’t guess at why. The city was crawling with hopefuls itching for a chance at a lifetime supply of Oxy—or inhalers for their kids. Either way, they spelled trouble for Miss Little. Even though she was staying put for some reason, it’s still hard to find one person in a city as big as Montreal, especially when you’re competing against two hundred other guys and none of the traffic cams work. For all they knew, she was sitting at the top of an apartment building picking Myra’s thugs off from a seventieth-story balcony. The Skype calls all came from different locations, and she never stayed on long enough for the Guy to trace them. Maybe they’d never catch her.

Yes, Hatsu thought, as she watched ex-TBS late-night performer Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier slide his dick into Myra Kaspbrak’s ex-husband’s ass with clinical detachment, it seemed unlikely that they would ever find her. It was a harebrained idea to start with. None of these randos were qualified to apprehend a fugitive. They’d just get in each other’s way. And Marian had already proved that she was capable of outsmarting Myra Kaspbrak. 

For a moment, her pity shifted from herself to Marian. It must be terrible, being hunted. Hatsu sent good thoughts to her. Stay strong and clear, Miss Little. Better for the both of us if you take it on the run—like, yesterday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why, but whenever I think of Reddie I think of REO Speedwagon. Take It On the Run and Time For Me to Fly especially. If anyone's interested, I could post my full Reddie playlist, but be warned: there's a lot of prog. Fun fact: my dad HATES REO, but to me, they're like the music equivalent of chicken nuggets. Zero nutritional value, but goes down real easy and feels nice.


	17. Clash in the Cathedral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Staring down from this high window  
At the faces in the line  
Cold from hours of waiting  
How many people can you love?  
When you're black and blue with bruises  
From collisions on the road  
The friction grind of traveling  
This is the never ending show...  
***  
Woke up last night under the mountains  
Driving from Zurich to Milan  
I lay there listening to the echoes  
Thinking of Iceland and Japan  
So many smiles, so many faces  
And my home so far away  
I lose some of me in all these places  
And I can't help the way I'm changed..."  
-"80 Days," Marillion, from This Strange Engine

ROCHESTER, NY

“Eddie, stop the car!” Richie shouted. Eddie stood up on the brake, 

“What?” 

The radio disintegrated back into static. 

“Wait. Back up. There was something about—on the radio—” 

Eddie rolled his eyes, but he complied, throwing it into reverse, crawling backwards until the crackling on the radio fell away to reveal a voice. “It’s Marian,” Richie gasped. “Turn it up.” 

“... Richie, Eddie, anyone else...if you hear this, head east. Stay away from Montreal. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” 

“Montreal!” Richie gasped. “Eddie, did you hear that? Sweetheart, how close are we?” 

“I don’t know, six hours? Richie, are you sure she’s still there?” 

The track squealed and flipped over. 

“Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation. Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation. Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation. We have assumed control. We have assumed control. We have assumed control. Richie, Eddie, anyone else...if you hear this, head east. Stay away from Montreal. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“She’s holding them there, Eddie! She’s pushing us towards D.C. We have to get up there, hon!” 

Eddie was frozen in place, hands clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. He was gasping for breath, chest heaving, shoulders shaking. 

“You...wanted to do this,” Richie said. “Right?”

Eddie nodded. His small face was pinched and gaunt, but he still looked determined. 

“I did. I do. Just...give me a moment.” 

“What’s got you so worried?” Richie asked. The moment he said it, he felt stupid. He knew, of course. They both knew. But. 

Eddie made a soft “tch!” sound. “Richie, what happens if she catches us? She’ll KILL you, all right? I knew—but I didn’t—I didn’t THINK—”

“Sweetheart,” Richie said softly. Kindly. 

“You drive,” Eddie said. “By the time we get there, I’ll be ready.” 

“Eds.”

“No,” he said resolutely. “Don’t ‘Eds’ me. I’ll be fine. This is the right thing.” 

***

MUSEE DES BEAUX-ARTS, RUE SHERBROOKE, MONTREAL, QUEBEC

“Are these the best thugs you have, Myra?” Marian yelled, reloading her revolver and chambering the round with a flick of her wrist. “Because I’m not impressed!” 

One ex-divorce attorney with a bad ankle. 

Two men dead at her feet. 

This was not how Marian Little intended to spend her vacation. 

She slid down the hallway of the Musee de Beaux Arts, the clopping of her heels muffled by the carpeted floor. She had minutes, maybe less, before they found her. Her only chance was to keep moving. 

When they had called the election, her mother had gotten up and left the room, walking out into the chilly night. Marian had caught her before she made it to the metro station. 

“Mom, what’s going on?” she had asked. Stupid question, of course, to ask an aging dyke who had come of age at the height of the AIDS crisis, always afraid of someone trying to rape her straight, or just beat the shit out of her. 

“My eyes have been opened,” Roxanne answered. “I have seen night eternal.” 

They didn’t see her for three days. 

That feeling, the terror of not knowing where her family was was back, and that dislocation was tearing her up inside. Now that she had had time to think about it, she wasn’t so sure the radio message had been a good idea. If Richie and Eddie hadn’t known where she was, they wouldn’t be able to come after her. Maybe warning them had just been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for those stubborn assholes to follow. The papers, though...if they came back…

No use thinking that way now, though. There was no way that she could get back in that studio now. The whole area around Mount Royal was scotched. So was the apartment, the Complex Desjardins, and now, Rue Sorbonne. 

The subways had been a godsend. The trains were no longer running, but she could still make her way from point A to point B, and so long as nobody saw her enter the station, she could lock the turnstiles behind her. So far as she knew, they didn’t have a lockpick on their side. Dying art, it was. Kids these days.

It was weird that here, at the end of all things, she was thinking mostly about Richie and Eddie. She was terrified for Booker, of course, but he was with their mothers. They would take care of him. He wasn’t the one that had a lunatic actively attempting to kill him, and Marian aimed to keep it that way. 

Marian reached down, pulled her penlight from her pocket, and headed towards the Cathedral. 

LAC-PONT-CHAMPLAIN, AUTOROUTE 10, QUEBEC

“We’re fifteen minutes out,” Eddie said. “Any luck figuring out where she was broadcasting from?” 

“Well, the radio station broadcasts out of McGill University, but she could be anywhere by now.” 

“That can’t be true. She’d be somewhere she knows.” 

“Like?” 

“Well, she visited us at the apartment on Rue Bleury we rented during our honeymoon,” Richie said, marking the atlas he had open on his lap. “She was at our wedding at the Cathedral. We met her once at the Musee de Beaux Arts, and we saw that show at L’Olympia…” 

“She’s a lawyer. What if she went back for the papers?” 

“Well, what use would those be?” Richie asked, exasperated. “I don’t even know why she kept them. We asked her to burn them.” 

“I knew she wouldn’t,” Eddie said, leaning forwards to keep an eye on a pack of Walkers ambling along the side of the road. “She’s a perfectionist, Rich. She wanted to send Myra to jail.”

“Well, I’m with her there,” Richie sighed. 

It was only half true. Richie wanted Myra dead. Eddie hadn’t wanted to pursue it, though. He just wanted her gone. Peace was more important to him than revenge, and it was his call. There was a rage in Richie, though, that would never go away. The absolute disgust he had for Myra and Sonia was one of the few truly dark spots in Richie’s life. He understood Marian’s dedication. How were you supposed to assimilate the idea that someone like Myra could do so much harm and just...walk away? No. Marian was a lawyer. She wanted life to play by the rules. Even if she had to force it to. 

“Head downtown,” Richie said. “We’ll do a loop. I just hope we’re not too late.”

CATHEDRAL MARIE-REINE-DU-MONDE, BOULEVARD RENEE-LEVESQUE, MONTREAL, QUEBEC 

Marian had almost made it to the choir when she was shot. 

It didn’t feel like she thought it would. The pain was more blunt than she had expected, more like being hit in the shoulder with a hammer than being stabbed with a knife. Blood blossomed out from the wound below her collarbone, a few inches left of her armpit. She turned around, much too slowly, and fell off of the ladder, landing on her hands and knees. She managed to stagger upright, but the guy who had taken the shot closed the distance, and punched her hard in the stomach. 

It hurt. 

A lot. 

He must have hit something sensitive, because Marian’s arms and legs stopped working, and she fell limp, limbs weak, onto her side. Her cheek was pressed firmly against the cold marble floor. All she could see was her attacher’s New Balance sneakers and her own nerveless hand, thumbnail painted with chipped red nail polish. She tried to get up, but try as she might, all she could do was twitch her fingers. The world receded and swam in front of her eyes, the scene in front of her wrapped in a green haze. 

Her assailant grabbed her by the ankle and started to drag her, leaving a snail trail of gelatinous, fresh blood behind her. A thin wail tore its way from her throat, a physical reaction to the pain. 

“Booker!” she wailed. 

“Shut up,” someone said. “Someone put a gag on her.” 

There was a breeze, a creak, and an odd “thwipp” sound, like Spider-Man’s web-shooters, followed quickly by a meaty thump and a groan of pain. 

There was a fight. She couldn’t see the combatants, could barely hear, but she could only hope—

A pair of brown leather boots entered into her field of vision. Slender. Stylish. Well-tailored. The owner of the boots knelt down and turned her onto her back. 

“Marian! Oh, God, Rich, get me his shirt and some water!” 

The pain of being flipped made her vision fuzz over for a moment, but after the haze cleared, Marian could see someone looking down at her. Soft brown hair. Big brown doe eyes. Olive skin.

“Hold her down,” Eddie directed. “I have to get it out.”

She didn’t see what he did, but it was horrifically painful. Bright yellow spots burst across her field of vision. She screamed. 

“Water,” Eddie said. “Give me that compress.”

“No—no—get off me—”

“Marian, it’s for your own good.” Eddie put a handful of cloth strips on top of her bullet wound and pressed down with both hands. “Lift her up. I need to get the exit wound. Marian, we gotta go.” 

“Did you tie it in place?” 

“It’s as secure as it’s gonna get. Let’s take her to the museum. They’ll have a first aid kit.”

“No...Beaux Arts. Overrun…”

“Contemporaine is closer. Marian, you’re going to be fine. Get her up.”

“No. No. I need to rest...please...let me…” 

“Not now. I’ll get the door. Richie, hurry it up, and don’t let her rest.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I didn't know the girl,   
But I knew her family.   
All their lives were shattered  
In a nightmare of brutality.  
They tried to carry on,  
Tried to bear the agony.   
Tried to hold some faith  
In the goodness of humanity.  
As the years went by, we drifted apart.  
When I head that she was gone,   
I felt a shadow cross my heart-  
But she's nobody's hero..."   
-"Nobody's Hero," by Rush, from Counterparts

MUSÉE D’ART CONTEMPORAINE DE MONTRÉAL

At first, all Marian could see was darkness. She was lying on her side, and her bullet wound was throbbing hotly. For a horrible moment, she was afraid she might be blind, but she couldn’t summon the strength to cry out. She twitched a hand and gasped. Someone took her hand and rolled her over, onto her back. From the forner of her eye, she saw the soft glow of white neon coming from the hallway to her left. 

“Eddie! She’s waking up!” Richie yelled. “Marian, shh. Don’t try to move. Just relax.” 

“Richie, pin her down. I need to check the bandages.” 

“Don’t you dare--aah!” 

“I’m sorry, Roxanne,” Eddie whispered, bending down to prod at the tight web of gauze wrapped around her shoulder. “It’s for your own good. We can’t let you get infected, cherie.” 

Marian managed to pull a painful smile. 

“Okay. You should be okay to sit up. Does it hurt?”

“I just got shot, hell yes it hurts! Why the hell did you two come here?” 

Eddie sniffed shortly. 

“I thought you’d be happy. We did just save your life.” 

“For now, sure!” Marian shook her head. “Now they’ll take us all to her.”

“Well, we won’t let that happen.” Richie crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “They can’t have all of the ways out of the city locked down.”

“That’s not the problem! We can’t bring them back to Washington with us. My parents and brother are there.”

Eddie started to pace. His heels clopped against the lacquered wooden floors 

“No. No way. I am not dying here.” 

Marian, who had been delicately squeezing her injured shoulder, shook her head.

“She wants you alive. She wants us--” she gestured to herself, and then to Richie. “--dead.”

“Oh, wonderful. That makes me feel much better.” He scowled, and crossed his arms. “Well, I’m not giving up. I have come too far, and lived through too much, to just die here.” He snapped his fingers. “Marian. What’s the situation at the airport?” 

“Hell if I know. It was mobbed when I first came through, but you’ve lost it if you think that they’re running any flights.” 

“We don’t need them,” Eddie said. “Richie knows how to fly.” 

Marian looked up, eyes wide. Richie did the same. 

“M-me?” 

“Yes. You. You told me that you had a pilot’s license.” 

“Yeah, I did. I mean, I do. But I--I flew a Cessna, not--”

“Well, let’s see if we can find one.” 

Marian groaned. 

“Jesus. This is not how I wanted to die.” 

“You wanted a shot, I’m gonna give it to you.” Eddie shook his head decisively. “IT didn’t kill me. Neither will Myra.” 

That was weird. Marian assumed he had been talking about Myra, but something about the way he said “IT” made her skin crawl. Like he was talking about the number one scariest thing in the world. 

“Eddie, hush.” 

Coming from Richie, that was super odd. He almost never directed any serious criticism at anyone, much less at Eddie, and he was the last person to try to get him to quiet down. Usually it was hard to get a word in edgewise. She assumed that Eddie was talking about something health-related, cancer, maybe, but that didn’t explain--

“Marian,” Richie said. “Can you walk?”

She winced and hissed as she pulled herself upright, but the pain was bearable. 

“I wish I had something to give you,” Eddie said. “Will you be all right?” 

“Yeah. Fine.” Marian winced. “Jesus Christ, Eddie, that hurts! What did you do to me?” 

“I pulled out the bullet, put some gauze in there, and bandaged it up.”

“I can feel it creaking in there! How many cotton balls did you put in my gaping flesh wound? Just because you want a bunch of balls in your gash--” 

“All right, cut it out, both of you! You know that I love mean-spirited potshots and repartee as much as the next guy, but we can’t stay here. Eventually you’re gonna bleed through that compress, and we won’t know how to fix you. We gotta get out of here, Mags.” 

Marian sighed. He was right, of course. Getting out of there was unlikely, but it was their only shot. A city seemed pretty big when you were only avoiding five or six assholes, but there were more assholes arriving every day. They had to get out of the city. 

“You know I told you not to come,” she said. 

Richie gave a noncommittal half-shrug. He looked pale, a little skinnier than the last time she’d seen him, and his previously-carefully-curated stubble was starting to grow out into a proper beard. He was clinging to Eddie a bit, two fingers looped into one of his belt loops, hips snugged together, heads tilting together. Eddie’s lips were parted, and his brow was creased. 

They were good friends, she thought. Maybe she’d always known they’d come. 

She immediately dismissed the thought. It was silly, psychoanalytic hocus-pocus. Nobody could have predicted this insanity. 

“Yeah. I told you to stay away. But, uh, I’m glad you came.” 

Eddie smiled. 

“We couldn’t leave you. It’s our fault you’re in this mess.”

“That’s not exactly true. I did my job. Got paid. Case closed, right? Nothing owed.” 

“Yeah. Not exactly.” Eddie stepped forwards, offering Marian his hand. “You’re some of the only family we have left, Mags. We couldn’t abandon you.” 

Marian cleared her throat. 

“I’ve been moving through the subways. The trains are down, but I’ve been picking the locks on the service tunnels. Place d’Arts is close, but I don’t know how far I can walk.” 

“We can help you, but we can’t, uh, carry you, I think. Right?” Richie asked. 

“That’s right, you can’t.” She winced, shifted her weight, and leaned hard on Eddie. “We gotta get to Angrigon, then steal a car, maybe? Get to the airport? They’ll be searching the city, block to block.”

“How organized are these people?”

“Not very. They’re all competing against each other. Doesn’t make for a very cohesive force.” 

“You sound like you know,” Eddie observed dryly. 

“My mom was military. She commanded a special ops Air Force squadron back in the early aughts. She always told me that an army without trust is just a gang.”

“I thought your mother was a fed.” 

“No, no. My other mother. The one who doesn’t talk.” She squeaked in pain as Eddie wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her upright. 

“So, your parents were Jason Bourne and Jean-Luc Picard,” Richie joked. They had seen Michelle Little in the courtroom--a tall, athletic woman with olive skin and smooth black hair (shot with white at the temples, the only visible sign that she was north of fifty) pulled back in a ponytail--but had never spoken to her. 

“More like Clarice Starling and Commander Shepard. They were two dedicated people at the top of their fields. Everyone else was terrified of them. They were a perfect match.” 

“Yeah, they go together like a tornado and fifteen sharks.” Richie held open the side door of the museum to allow Eddie and Marian to limp past. “They didn’t kick her out for being gay?”

“She wasn’t anything when she was in the service. Too focused on work. I guess nobody asked, and it was tough for her to tell anything. Her squad learned sign language after the crash, but nobody else did. Made it easy for them to talk shit.” 

“How’d she lose her voice?” Richie asked. Eddie scowled at him over Marian’s head, but Marian didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Eddie thought, she seemed to be warming to the topic. He wondered bitterly what it would be like to be able to be proud of his parents, to be inspired by their life story, to follow their example instead of waging a bloody, forty-year campaign to cut the cord. 

“Yep, she got in a helicopter crash, all right,” Marian sighed. “I guess there was some tissue damage, or an infection. She’s got a big vertical scar right on her neck. I don’t think she was a big talker even before that.”

They walked down the stairs and came to a thick iron door marked with the words:

MAINTENANCE UNIQUEMENT: ENTRE NON INAUTORISEE INTERDITE 

“Keep a lookout,” Marian said. 

“Can you get down on the ground?” Eddie asked. 

“Yeah. Jury’s still out on getting back up.”

It was obviously getting more and more painful for Marian to move, Eddie observed. She could barely lift her left arm to reach the lock. She fumbled with the lockpick, struggling to get a good grip on it with her pale, nerveless fingers. It took her almost a minute to get the door open. Eddie flicked his eyes at Richie, pulling a brief grimace. Richie returned the glance, giving his head a minute shake and pushing his glasses up his nose. Eddie had to pull her up by grabbing her good arm and a handful of her shirt for leverage. She wasn’t much shorter than him, and even though she was considerably less muscular, she was still an unwieldy weight to support. By the time they got to the end of the tunnel, Eddie was getting scared. She was stumbling, feet barely leaving the ground with each step. Her face was bone-pale and drawn. From the doorway, they could see a white Ford Focus with only a few walkers milling around it. Marian drunkenly reached for her .44, but Eddie grabbed her wrist. 

“C’mon. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Can you shoot?” she panted. 

“Richie, take her,” Eddie directed, taking the gun and walking forwards. 

“Uh, Eds?” Richie asked, grabbing Marian around the waist and staggering with the sudden added weight. “Why don’t you keep back from the brain-eating monsters?” 

Eddie didn’t have any experience outside of a shooting range--well, and the sewer, though that wasn’t the same, no, not at all--but his patience had done run out. He was pissed, and he wanted to go home. This was fucking nuts. 

His first shot hit the nearest walker dead center, but that didn’t seem to bother it much. He shot it again, this time blowing the top of its head off. The others turned to stare at him, beginning to shamble forwards. There were different kinds, he realized. Of the two remaining, one was desiccated and grey, its eyes two blue-grey-purple congealed drops of jelly in each bony socket. The other was bloated, tawny-white, and pustulent, moving forwards with palsied, jittering movements. The latter was about three yards away when he killed it, the former was maybe four feet. He shot it short-range, his arm at a right angle, the gun tucked close to his waist offset recoil. The impact shattered its skull, filling the air with shards of dried skin like tortilla-chip crumbs. As it collapsed, some car keys jingled out of its pocket and onto the asphalt. They weren’t for the Ford, but when he pressed the unlock button, a nearby Toyota Tundra chirped with alacrity. 

“About time something went right,” Richie observed. 

Eddie just shook his head, chewing the inside of his lower lip. Someone would’ve heard the gunshots. Time was short. He fought the urge to tap his foot as Richie carried a near-fainting Marian to the backseat. He leaped into the passenger seat, rolling down the window to peer out. The street was quiet. 

Richie got into the driver’s seat, jamming the key into the ignition. 

“Which way to the airport?”

“Southwest.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so fucking long, my school absolutely screwed me by switching to digital at the last second, forcing me to change all my classes and aaaAAAHHHHHH 
> 
> anyways...here's this.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's seen too much of life  
And there's no going back  
The loneliness calls him  
And the edge which must be sharpened  
He's losing it. And he knows.  
But there's a fighter in his mind and his body's tough  
The years have been unkind but kind enough
> 
> The smell of the earth  
It's his favourite smell  
But he's somehow compelled to the stinging salt hell  
To the place where he hurts and he's scared  
And there's no one to tell  
And no one who doesn't listen
> 
> "You can take all the boys and the girls in the world  
And I'll trade them this morning for my sweet Ocean Cloud  
I've seen too much of life  
So the sea is my wife and a sweet Ocean Cloud is a mistress I'm allowed  
for now."  
-"Ocean Cloud," from Marbles, by Marillion

Contagious illnesses spread very quickly in densely populated areas. Charlie Poapst, like so many other people, learned this firsthand that October. When the first student came after her, she thought he’d just snapped. It happened at regular colleges and high schools all the time--why not at boot camp? Jam a bunch of kids together, work them until they puke...not to mention the weird ones that came in, thinking that the military was all about killing. She figured one of ’em had just gotten tired of waiting to take a life, and had decided to start out with her. Some of them didn’t take orders well. Larry Zucco was one of them. So when he came into her quarters and tried to strangle her, she wasn’t concerned about biological warfare. He’d had a bad attitude since day one, but it had been wash-out bad, not homicide bad. 

Charlie woke up right before he grabbed her. She smelled his breath, maybe--it was rank, but not rank in the normal way. It smelled like metal, like he was breathing radiation poisoning on her. Whatever the reason, she woke up, saw Zucco’s face next to hers, and rolled to the left. He didn’t grab her throat, but he did get a handful of her hair. She had to tear herself free. He got up from the bed, sluggishly. He was wearing a yellowed t-shirt and pale blue boxers. With a sort of detached horror, she realized his underwear was wet with fresh piss. He shuffled towards her, arms at his sides. Charlie wasn’t scared of him--at least, not physically. He wasn’t armed, and he wasn’t operating at full capacity. She let him close the gap, then socked him across the face with a closed fist. She had a vague idea that he might be sleepwalking, that that might wake him up, but all it did was stagger him. He got closer, opening his mouth and reeking forth that horrible metal stink. She stumbled back, reached into her drawer, and pulled out her nine millimeter. 

“Don’t make me do it,” she snarled, already knowing that she wouldn’t get an answer. He tried to bite her, but she yanked her hand back at the last second. 

After she shot him, Charlie bent down and pressed a hand to his forehead. He felt hot, like he had a fever, but she wasn’t an expert. If it was some kind of disease...no. Charlie got up, threw on clothes--not fatigues, best not to announce her affiliation, just some dark jeans, Doc Martens, and a navy blue tank top. Apart from the Night Stalkers tattoo on her arm, she could’ve been any late-twenties chick at a punk show. She had to find Sabrina. Sabrina might know, and if she didn’t, she could call the Doc, maybe run some tests--it had to be some kind of disease, right? For Chrissakes, he’d tried to bite her, like a rabid dog--

Something made her stop outside the sleeping quarters on the second floor. Sabrina’s room was at the end of the hall, past the mess hall, dormitory, and med bay. All she had to do was walk to the second-to-last door on the right, but something felt wrong. She pushed the door open with her right hand, left hand planted firmly on her pistol. 

The beds were all empty. Every single one. 

Genuinely scared now, Charlie started jogging towards Sabrina’s room. When she got there, the door was locked--one of Sabrina’s weird quirks, part of her never-ending search for privacy in a line of work that provided little to none--but Charlie just kicked it open. Sabrina gave a muffled scream, disentangling herself from her sheets and crabwalking backwards on the bed. 

“Quiet! It’s me.”

“Charlie! What--” Sabrina reached over and flipped the light switch by her bed. “You scared me half to death! What are you doing here?” 

Sabrina was a deeply tanned woman with a lilting Lebanese accent and a dandelion fluff of platinum blond hair. Try as she might, Charlie couldn’t think of a time where she’d ever seen Sabrina’s roots. It seemed impossible--Somalia, Iraq, hell, even Basic, when Charlie had shaved her own head out of frustration--but somehow she managed. Her impossibly light-gray eyes only added to her air of ethereal beauty.

“There’s something you need to see.” 

Back in Charlie’s quarters, Sabrina snapped on a pair of latex gloves and shone a penlight on Zucco’s face. After checking his pupils, she pried his mouth open. 

“There are sores in his mouth,” Sabrina said. “There’s pus...has he been sick?” 

“Not that I know of.”

“You said he tried to bite you?”

Charlie felt sick. She looked down at the brackish, rusty-brown fluid trickling onto Sabrina’s gloves.

“Come on. Get your hand out of there.” 

Sabrina removed her hand and began to cut off Zucco’s shirt. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Looking for a bite mark.”

“You think it’s rabies?”

“Yeah, maybe. Not rabies, not exactly, but some kind of bloodborne nervous-system disease.”

“Can you fix it?” 

Sabrina paused, tracing a deep, imprinted bite mark on Zucco’s shoulder with a gloved finger. 

“Hell if I know. I’m a combat medic, not a pathologist. But this bite mark isn’t very old. Something that causes this kind of neural decay, that fast...I can’t imagine it’s anything but fatal.”

Charlie was horror struck, but she moved on fast. There was no time to panic. They needed--

“We have to find Jack,” she blurted.

“Oh, shit,” Sabrina breather. “Jack.”

“We have to find Jack, and Rachel, and Sigurd, and Varrick, Sasha--” 

“Where’s the Cap?” 

“I don’t know, Baltimore, last I heard. The doc teaches at U of M, works at Quantico. They wanted Johnson at Annapolis, but she quit.” Charlie shook her head. “You remember. It all went to shit after Jack got hurt. She told me that she couldn’t do it. Two wars were enough. She wasn’t up for another, especially not without the squad together.” 

“Jack’s at the flight school in SoCal, and the rest are at Pope in N.C, I know that, but what about Sigurd?” 

“I know JSOC wanted him, but he said no. He does the special ops training for the Rangers now. They don’t want you to tell where--” 

“Fort Bragg, Kentucky.”

“He told you, too?” Charlie chuckled and shook her head.

“We used to take our jobs so seriously,” Sabrina sighed. “What happened.” 

“We had to. We were the 160th SOAR, you know? ‘Night Stalkers don’t quit,’ and all that. We used to believe, I guess.” 

“I never did--not in the mission,” Sabrina said.

“Then why stay?” 

Sabrina walked over to Charlie’s bed, stepping nonchalantly over Zucco. She plunked herself down, sitting with her hands hanging between her knees. Charlie could see the taut, pale scar on her right cheek shining in the low light. She looked tired, damn near haggard, like life on the base had been draining her in a way that life in war zones hadn’t. Charlie felt awful, for a moment, that she hadn’t noticed. Maybe it had seemed normal to her because the separation from the 160th had been doing the same thing. She’d come to the unit fucked up, and Captain Johnson had fixed her, and slowly, day by day, percentage point by percentage point, she’d been fucking herself up again. The boredom--it wasn’t good for her. And she missed the rest of her friends. When the thoughts formed, she felt pathetic, but that didn’t make it any less true.

“For the people,” Sabrina said. “We weren’t fighting for the mission. Axis of evil--what a fucking joke. We were fighting for each other--keeping each other alive. Then Jack got hurt, and they fucked us over...they split us up, then we really realized we weren’t going to find any damn WMDs.” Sabrina laughed bitterly. “Charlie, do you remember a time when you thought that you mattered? You know, believe in the school song, die for your country? A country that cared for you--all in it together. Well, if it ever was more than a lie or some vague romantic notion, it’s all shattered now. You remember what Jack kept screaming while he was lying there, bleeding into the dirt?” 

“Why is nothing ever true?”

Sabrina nodded. She stood up, pacing, talking fast. “When we were with Michelle, we were happy enough to believe that we belonged to something more than us, a country that cared for us, a national anthem we could sing without feeling used or ashamed--”

“I know,” Charlie said softly. 

“We’ve only got ourselves to blame, huh?”

Charlie reached across the room and cupped Sabrina’s shoulder for an awkward moment. 

“We have to find Jack. He might not--” She shook her head. “We should go.” 

They ran down the hall. Strange noises were coming from the dormitories. Charlie stopped. “We have to check.”

“No. If he came to you, he must’ve already turned everyone in his quarters. There’s no way of knowing who’s infected.” 

“You could check for bite marks,” Charlie suggested.

“What if someone with a mouth sore kissed an infected person? What if they had sex? Charlie, use your head. We can’t risk it.” 

“Wait.” Charlie pulled the fire alarm and turned to Sabrina. “I’m going to the PA unit. Leave me behind if you have to.” 

Sabrina sighed, and took off after her. 

The first ambush came in the stairwell. This time, the man went for Sabrina, but she was able to kick him in the kneecap and knock him down a flight of stairs. She drew her Beretta and shot him, carefully, coldly, three times in the chest and head. She tucked the gun back into the waistband of her white dressing down. 

“Let’s move.”

Sabrina wasn’t a front-line fighter--that wasn’t her job description--but she was still deadly with small arms. The team had been so small, everyone had to be able to hold their own. The Captain, Charlie, and Sigurd had been the heavy arms experts, Sasha and Varrick the snipers, Rachel the combat engineer, Sabrina the medic. Sabrina was kind, gentle, and calm by nature, but cold and resolved on the battlefield. Her violence--all of their violence--had come not from hatred of the enemy. They were too smart for that, they had thought smugly. They had been told that the enemy was calculated, fanatical, evil. They knew that most were just desperate and afraid young men who would take any opportunity not to fight them. The real fights came with the raids, assassinations, the storming of compounds. They were there to get the real bad guys, not scared, indoctrinated children. Those people, they did kill. Maybe they were evil, maybe not. The doc studied evil people--murderers, rapists, child molesters--and she said that evil was just a word people used to separate themselves from the people they were afraid of. Under the skin, it was simple pain. As a soldier, Charlie could not dissever herself from the corpses of the people she had killed. After all, they were both just doing their jobs. Everyone she had killed was a part of her, which, when you think about it, meant that she was more dead than alive. 

Sabrina unlocked the door to the room containing the public address system with a practiced flick of her wrist. The metallic scent that she had smelled on the breath of Zucco was only getting stronger the deeper they went into the facility. The taste tugged at a memory, and Charlie’s entire body turned cold when she remembered: 

They had been stateside, on shore leave, after shit had gone sideways in Mogadishu. They had stayed with the doc and Captain Johnson in their Seattle split-level, doing their own little things during the day and hitting the U District dive bars and Asian restaurants in the evenings. Rachel had been fiddling with the doc’s Green Ford Taurus, trying to fix the ignition, and had ended up with a big-ass chemical burn on the back of her hand, all the way up through her forearm. The doc had filled a bowl with milk and soaked her hand, and as they waited for the wound to be ready to bandage, she had told them that, as a fellow at Sloan-Kettering, she had been allowed to fly to Hospital No. 6 in Moscow to help treat the victims of radiation poisoning airlifted from Kyivska Oblast after the explosion at Chernobyl. She told them that the firefighters had tasted the sour taste of metal, felt pins and needles, and then, a week later, they were dying. Charlie, who had been a new corporal, had been horrified at the thought of being killed by something that couldn’t be seen or stopped, that there were forces in the world that could tear the molecules of your cells apart, leaving only the sour tang of metal behind as a calling card. 

“That’s why I wanna die on the battlefield,” Charlie had said, just a touch too loud. The Captain had arched an eyebrow at her--that was before she lost her voice, but even then, she had made herself understood without words. “You know,” Charlie explained. “Fast.”

The Captain shook her head and turned to her. 

“Die on someone else’s time,” she rasped.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out my other reddie fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20647154  
I'm really proud of it, and I'd love to see it get some more love. Much love to everyone who takes time to read my stuff! Consider this blanket permission to repost, create art, whatever else you might like to do with my writing/my characters. I love to see what people come up with-you're all so creative!


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